The Five Stages of Grief
by La Guera
Summary: In the aftermath of the bombing, the team reacts to Flack's injuries.
1. Denial

Disclaimer: All recognizable places, characters, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **This is the first in a five-part series of stories. All five parts are already completed and will be posted weekly. While they are interconnected, they are not linear and can be read and understood independently of each other. These stories contain spoilers for S1 and S2, so read at your own risk.

Danny Messer hunkered in the dark parking lot of Trinity Hospital with his spinning head between his knees and told himself he wasn't going to puke. Puking in public was for drunks and pussies, and he had always prided himself on being neither, though he was no longer sure about the latter. After all, hadn't he just tucked his tail between his legs and run out on his best friend, who was lying in a hospital bed with his guts held in by staples and medical gauze?

_That ain't Flack, _screamed a childish, panicky voice at the base of his brain. _It ain't. I don't care what your eyes are tellin' you, or what the evidence bags with the bits of bloody shrapnel say. It ain't Flack. Flack is a big, lanky horse of a kid, all shoulders and teeth and elbows and bony goddamned hairy Irish knees. He bulls down lippy suspects and wolfs down more pastrami and pickles and slaw than most human bein's can stomach in a week. What he don't do is lie there on the bed, whiter than the hospital bedsheets, and look like a doll that some nasty little bastard kid tore apart and then tried to put back together again with hope and fuckin' duct tape._

The voice was dangerous, and experience had taught him several painful lessons on why it was best ignored. It was the voice that had persuaded him to go to IAB behind Mac's back after the Minhas shooting, and convinced him to ignore Louie's repeated phone calls while he was trapped in that rich nut's panic room. He knew he should dismiss it, stop his ears against it, but it was easier to believe that the voice was right this time, that that really _wasn't _Donnie Flack in that room that looked so much like Louie's.

_You thought it was tellin' the truth about Mac not havin' your back in the Minhas shootin', too, and look where that got you, _Louie pointed out with grim pragmatism. _You almost landed your ass in the clink, the one place I spent the last fifteen fuckin' years tryin' to keep you out of._

Yeah, well, what was he supposed to do? Mac didn't exactly have a stellar track record of looking out for his crew, and especially not Danny Messer, son of a mob thug. Sure, Mac had taken a big risk hiring him, but he'd never let him forget it, either, and frankly, he was tired of bowing and scraping and walking an invisible tightrope just to keep in Mac's mercurial good graces. It was too much work for too little loyalty in return. Mac's only loyalty was to the lab and to his precious reputation, and so when the bullets had started flying, he had decided to look out for himself since he had known that Mac wasn't going to do it, not at the risk of his golden child of steel and glass.

_And a bang-up job you done there, Messer, _sneered Sonny Sassone. _The more you try to look out for number one, the more spectacularly you fuck things up. People have been cleanin' up your messes for you your whole life. First, it was your ma, wipin' the shit off your ass, and then it was Louie, who spent his life keepin' your nose clean. His encounter with my Louisville slugger ain't the first time he's gone to bat for you, is it?_

"Naw, it ain't," he admitted to the rough asphalt between his knees and under his feet.

_Course it ain't, _Sonny went on as if there had been no interruption. _He put up with your sorry ass until he was seventeen and left that shithole in his rearview mirror. You followed him around the house and the neighborhood in your droopin' diapers, and he never kicked your ass for it like he should'a. He let you tag along like some retarded puppy 'cause he was too soft and didn't have the heart to tell you you were a fuckin' waste of space. Maybe if he had, he wouldn't be up at that rehab hospital now, dinin' on Jell-O and fingerpaintin' with his own shit._

_Don't you fuckin' dare lay that on me, Sassone, you fuckin' son of a bitch, _he thought savagely. _You swung that bat, not me._

_Yeah, but you made it possible. I only swung it 'cause of you, and his head was only under it because'a you. That makes you culpable, don't it? After all, you put him in that position in the first place by tryin' to tag along with us to Atlantic City that day. If you'd'a kept your nose outta Tanglewood business and played in your sandbox like a good little boy, you never woulda dropped that butt, and Louie never woulda needed to turn yellow like he did. Everything that happened to him was because you were too much of a pussy to walk the walk. In my book, that makes you a facilitator._

'_Course, as I said, this ain't the first time you've put him in that position. You were always a snot-nosed little punk, thinkin' you were bigger and badder than you were. You remember that time when you were eight? In case you've gotten a little foggy in your declinin' years, lemme refresh your memory. _

_You thought you were hot shit even back then. You thought that bein' the son of a low-level mob grunt made you somethin' special, meant you were untouchable. You swaggered around the neighborhood like the name _Messer _meant more than boot-lickin' snitch, and you lorded your imaginary connections and status over the other kids in the neighborhood. Every time things got heated on the playground, you threatened 'em with mob men in fedoras and shady trenchcoats like life was some kind'a TV movie put on for your entertainment._

_Most'a the time, the grandstandin' worked, but one day, you lipped off to the wrong kids, kids who either didn't know about Louie Messer, Sr., or didn't give a shit. They were bigger and meaner, and it didn't matter how big you thought your balls were. They hit harder. They left you on that playground a cryin', bleedin', snot-caked mess, lyin' on the hot cement and tryin' to clutch all the parts that hurt. You were bleedin' from the nose and mouth, and your ribs and balls felt like they'd been caved in. It was twenty minutes before you could get up, and the whole time, the hookers across the street were pointin' and laughin', like it was some kind'a joke that an eight-year-old was lyin' in a heap on the playground. You hated them for laughin', and you thought of their painted, clown faces all the way home, but you hated yourself more for givin' 'em somethin' to laugh at._

You limped home, suckin' wind and spittin' bloody snot onto the pavement like breadcrumbs, and it was Louie who found you when you hobbled into the kitchen. He was standin' in front of the refrigerator lookin' for somethin' to eat when you staggered in with your arm over your ribs and tears drippin' off your chin.

What the fuck happened to you? _he demanded when he looked over the top of the refrigerator door and saw you swayin' in the middle of the kitchen like the world's youngest wino, with blood drippin' onto the warped linoleum in tiny spatters. He put the chicken leg he'd lifted from the fridge onto the counter and ambled over for a closer inspection._

_So you told him the whole story, wipin' your snotty nose on the sleeve of your shirt and cryin' all over again like a pussy baby. You expected fraternal sympathy or maybe some righteous indignation on your behalf, but what you got was a roundhouse slap upside your already throbbin' head and told to clean up and hide the mess before Pop came home and administered another beatin' for bein' such a dumbass and drawin' attention to the family business. You thought it was so unfair, but later, Louie was the one who brought you a puddin' pop and washed your bloody clothes._

You thought that was the end of it, but a couple'a days later, Louie takes off on his bike after dinner with his hockey stick across the handlebars. You just figured he was goin' to play with the neighborhood kids, but when he came back that night, his stick was busted in half, his knuckles were bruised and swollen, and there was blood all over his clothes. He told your ma that he'd fallen off his bike, and she let it drop, because she'd learned a long time ago not to ask questions. Your Pop looked at Louie for a long time, and you could see the cogs grindin' in his head as he studied him.

An accident, huh? _he grunted shrewdly, and shifted the toothpick in his mouth from one side to the other._

_Louie shuffled his feet and swiped his nose with a grimy forearm, but he stood his ground. _Yes, sir, Pop. An accident.

_A noncommittal grunt from your old man. _Well, make sure you clean up after the accident real good, ya hear me?

Yes, sir, Pop.

_Your old man's face disappeared behind his newspaper again, and Louie went into his bedroom to clean up. Like you always did, you followed him, and when you got there, he was sittin' on the rumpled edge of his bed, examinin' the splintered edges of his busted hockey stick._

You okay, Lou? _You stepped over a pile of dirty clothes and came to stand at the foot of his bed. His room smelled like sweat and cigarettes and patchouli, and you thought it was such an exotic, grown-up smell._

_Louie jumped. _Yeah, yeah, shortpants, I'm good, _he said, and tossed the bits of broken stick to the floor. _Don't worry about it.

_But you did worry about it. Louie loved that stick, had gotten it for Christmas as a present from your skinflint old man. Now that he'd busted it, there wouldn't be another stick until his birthday or next Christmas, or maybe not even then 'cause boys who couldn't show a little gratitude for gifts and take care of 'em didn't deserve more. He had taken good care'a that stick, had cleaned it after every game and made sure it was never underfoot, and now it was in three pieces of useless garbage._

'M sorry about your stick, Lou. How'dja break it?

_His shoulders tensed. _Don' worry 'bout it, I said. _Dangerous, now. A slap was comin' if you kept pushin'._

'Kay, Lou, _you muttered, stung, and turned to go._

Hey, shortpants? _Quiet._

_You turned in the doorway, tuggin' the threadbare hem of you t-shirt. It was a nervous habit you later dropped in favor of the ever-more popular and trendy takin'-off-your-glasses-and-pinchin'-the-bridge-of-your-nose. _Yeah, Lou?

Those punk kids ain't gonna screw with you no more, all right? But you gotta learn to keep your mouth shut. I ain't always gonna be around.

But he was around eight years later, when your old man tried to bring you into the family business as a runner for his bookie. Louie was already one of us, then, but he fought hard to keep your stupid, eager-beaver nose clean. He thought you were destined for bigger and better things than buckin' stolen cigarettes onto a truck or mulin' sweet china white across the border with a kilo up your ass. He and your worthless old man went to blows over where you'd end up, and Louie won, but not before he'd lost a tooth.

He was standin' on the back stoop afterwards, spittin' blood and wipin' his mouth on the sleeve of his t-shirt. It reminded you of the time you limped home with your battered ego in your bruised stomach, spittin' blood like breadcrumbs. You opened your mouth to say somethin', but he spoke first.

Don't say I never didn't nothin' for ya, neither, shortpants, _he mumbled thickly, and smiled at you, exposin' the bloody hole where he used to have a tooth._

_But you did forget. That's how it is with you, Messer. You have a bad habit of forgettin' where you came from. It don't matter how good somebody does for you in the past, the minute they do somethin' you don't like, forget about it. Boom. Done. They're excommunicated from the Church of Messer with no explanation, and it's damn near impossible to receive absolution._

_That's bullshit, Sonny, _his indignant mind shrieked.

_The fuck it is. Louie busted his ass for you, and what did you do the minute you got your ambitious foot in the academy door? You dropped him like a bad habit. It was all fine and good to take the fifty he sent you every now and then when you were in college and starvin' so bad that the scraps on the plates you washed at the local greasy spoon made your mouth water. But the minute you figured out you had a shot at the brass ring, your loser brother became a liability. A gangster brother don't look good on the old professional resume, so you cut him loose. Stopped takin' his phone calls and pretended he didn't exist. Hey, that shouldn't be too hard now that he can't walk or wipe his own ass. Good old Louie did you one last favor by becomin' a retard. How about that?_

He growled behind locked and gritted teeth, and Lindsay, who had been keeping a discreet distance ever since he went down on his haunches, stepped tentatively forward.

"Danny?" She rested her hand on his shoulder. "You okay?"

God, what a stupid fucking question from somebody who should know better. No, he was not okay. His brother was a vegetable, one of his best friends was a pile of ash and teeth in a silk-lined casket, and his best friend was lying in the hospital he'd just left, doing a flawless imitation of that twisted Operation game he'd played with Louie as a little kid. He shook her off with an irritated jerk of shoulder and scuttled a few paces away from her. She did not follow. She merely bit her lower lip and rocked on her heels.

_What's the matter there, Messer? _Sonny said slyly. _Don't wanna talk about Louie? All right, then. No problem. Let's talk about Mac, then. Your boss, the big hero, the one who sewed your pal's guts back in with a dirty shoelace. Mr. Straight-Ass Marine Mac Taylor. Why not? He's another one on the list of people you turn on when it suits you. When things are good, Mac is God and Mr. Rogers all rolled into one. He can do no wrong. _

_Oh, but when things go bad-and they always seem to with you; have you noticed that?-there is no Hell hot enough for him. Every good thing he's ever done for you goes out the window, and all you can do is stew over your injustices like a whiny pussy bitch. And make no mistake, Messer, he's done more for you than your sorry ass ever deserved._

_Oh, yeah? _he countered petulantly. _Name one thing he's ever done for me._ It was the stupidest thing in the world to be squatting in the fucking hospital parking lot, having an argument with an imaginary Sonny Sassone while Flack was pissing into a bag under the watchful eyes of Mac and Stella. It was ridiculous and selfish and utter assholery on his part. And he couldn't help it. At least he was doing _something_, even if it was as useless as jousting with invisible giants in the parking lot. If he'd had to hold another endless bedside vigil so soon after Louie, he'd've eaten his gun.

_Asshole, _Flack's voice said inside his head, wounded and accusatory, and he flinched. _Fuckin' asshole, Messer._

_One thing? Oh, how soon we forget. Who hired you, huh? You think you were so good that any head of this lab would be willin' to overlook the fact that for most of your growin' up, there was a surveillance van parked across the street from your house? Mr. Marine there took a big chance on you, and a lotta heat from the big brass upstairs. Not only were you an untested, hot-headed punk, but you were an untested, hot-headed punk with an unsavory history. He took you on in spite of the gossip and the risk, and you bet your ass they rode him hard for it._

_Or what about when it was your petard in the sling for that body in Giants Stadium? He had your back all the way. He coulda washed his hands of you and booted you outta his lab to protect his own ass, but he didn't. He went so far as to taint his lungs with a cigarette to prove your innocence._

_You mean, like he booted Aiden, _he thought before he could stop himself, and ran his fingers through his hair.

Oh, how that still burned. Four months on, and all he could still think about was how Mac could have saved her if he hadn't fired her. It wasn't like he had to; Aiden hadn't actually tampered with the evidence. She'd stopped herself before it went that far because she was a good cop. And if she had been tempted, he could hardly blame her. Pratt was a dirtbag, pure and simple, and everybody knew he was good for it.

_Besides, it ain't like she's the first CSI to be tempted, _Louie muttered. _God knows you have. You work these cases and see these scenes where teenage girls have been raped and murdered and thrown away like garbage, and then these assholes saunter into the precinct with their high-powered lawyers in tailored suits, smilin' like choir boys and hidin' the stink of their guilt behind high-priced cologne. It burns in your gut to watch Flack have to uncuff those sons of bitches and let them walk away while the family of the victim looks to you for answers you can't give. So, yeah, you've been tempted, and you'd bet your apartment that the others have been, too. You see it in Flack's eyes sometimes when he's bringin' in a wife-beater or a child molester, the urge to haul the perp into the forgotten back rooms of the precinct and administer justice at the end of a fist instead of a gavel. There's no cop worth his badge that ain't thought about it._

_Except for Mac, of course, _Danny retorted sullenly. _Mac Taylor is fuckin' perfect, without fuckin' sin, and that gives him the right to cast stones at everybody else. It came with bein' a Marine, I guess. Jesus' blood ain't the only thing that cleanses the soul; a uniform'll do it, too. And it gives you the power to work miracles. Like sewin' a guy's guts back in with a dirty shoelace._

_So why couldn't he raise Aiden from the dead? Why didn't he protect her? Flack's alive because he was there when he needed him. So why wasn't he there for her? Didn't she fuckin' matter, too? I carried her down the church steps and slid her into the back of a hearse. I watched her father wither and die under the weight of his grief. Oh, he's still alive, but not really. He just exists. Mac turned up in his immaculate suit and offered his condolences, but he didn't stay long. He turned tail and retreated to his precious lab. All the Marine bravado in the world don't count for much when you have to look into the eyes of a man who's lost his only child. He just left. Abandoned her when things got too uncomfortable. Just like he did when she was alive._

_Oh, yeah? Where were you? _Sonny demanded. _Yeah, you'd exchanged a few calls, and you'd planned to have dinner at her place the week she died, but it ain't like you were a regular visitor. You know why? Because it's outta sight, outta mind with you. Always has been. She wasn't around to remind you of her existence every day, so you forgot about her. You live up your own ass, Messer, and nothin' matters except what's happenin' to you. Her death is just as much your fault as it is Mr. Marine's. Maybe more. He never called himself her friend. All you had to do was stop by, just once. Maybe then you woulda seen how obsessed she was and stopped her before she wound up Pratt's crispy-fried fucktoy._

_Hey, wonder how long it'll be before you start forgettin' what Flack looks like?_

"Fuck!" he shouted, and slammed his palm into the asphalt. He balled his hand into a fist and pounded the rough surface of the parking lot. "Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!" He was dimly aware that he was hyperventilating.

This wasn't fair. None of this should be happening. Not Aiden, who was too young to be under the ground and not walking over it. Not Louie, who was drooling into his Jell-O on behalf of a brother who'd spent the last fifteen years being ashamed of him. Not Stella, who'd finally let somebody past her tough exterior, only to have to shoot the son of a bitch in her own bedroom. And not Flack. Especially not Flack.

_Bad news comes in threes. Ain't that how the sayin' goes? _he thought hysterically. _It always comes in threes. So, Flack shouldn'ta happened. He can't happen. It's against the fuckin' rules. Stella shoulda been the end of it, the last sacrifice before the gods went to pick on somebody else. There can't be four. Somebody upstairs made a mistake._

"Danny!" Lindsay's voice, sharp and urgent and utterly worthless. "Danny, stop!"

Then someone was grabbing his wrists, and he looked up, befuddled. Lindsay was crouching next to him, both hands wrapped around his wrist. "Danny, stop," she said. "It's okay."

He snorted and pulled away from her. "The fuck it is," he snapped, and she grimaced.

He rose from his crouch with the creak of tendon and hobbled gingerly until sensation returned to his feet. His hand ached and stung where knuckles had struck asphalt, and he could feel the thick wetness of blood on his overheated skin.

"We should take you back inside, get that looked at," she ventured after a moment.

He shook his head. "Naw, I'm good. I'm fine." He flexed and closed his hand a few times to show her just how fine he was and determinedly ignored the bright flares of pain sent from his torn flesh. "See? No big deal."

"Still, I think we should-,"

He cut her off. "I said no, all right? I'm not goin' back in there. It's not happenin'."

_Of course it ain't_, said an ugly, scabrous voice in the back of his head. _Between Louie and tonight, you've spent so much time in there that you're beginnin' to wonder if you'll ever get the smell outta your skin, plastic tubin' and piss and medical astringent. Besides, if you go back in there, you might pass his room again and see him lyin' there with the only signs of life comin' from the cardiac monitor above his bed, and if that happened, you might lose it, because then you'd have to admit that this was real._

Lindsay took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Fine," she conceded. "Then let me drive you home."

"I'm supposed to be drivin' you home, remember?"

"Yeah, well, plans have changed. You're in no shape to drive." She held out her hand for his car keys.

"Why?" he said defensively. "I'm not drunk."

"Danny," she repeated stubbornly, and advanced on him.

Suddenly, he was too tired to fight what he knew was a losing battle. He fumbled inside his pockets for the car keys and dropped them into her upturned palm. "There. Happy now?" he asked.

"No," she answered dully, and trudged to the driver's side of the car. "I'm not."

There wasn't much to say after that. She climbed into the driver's seat, and he slumped in the passenger seat, and as he pulled the door closed, the Flack inside his head spoke again.

_Fuckin' asshole, Messer, _he said mournfully.

Mercifully, Lindsay kept her mouth shut, a minor miracle for which he was pathetically grateful. She wanted to badger. She could feel her need to badger and busybody on the air like the promise of a lover's kiss and see it in the way her fingers gripped the wheel until her knuckles whitened. But something-self-preservation, maybe-kept her mouth shut.

He curled in on himself in the passenger seat, arms folded across his belly and forehead resting against the cool, smooth glass of the window. With no blind rage to distract him, the pain in his knuckles was a slow, simmering throb, and he suspected he'd broken a few.

"It's not Flack, you know," he said conversationally. "It's not. Can't be." Maybe if he said it enough, it would be real, and Flack would saunter out onto the lab backlot for a game of one-on-one in the morning just like they'd planned before everything got blown to hell. Maybe if he believed hard enough, it would happen. God and George Michael said you had to have faith, and right now, he was offering it up in spades.

"Danny," Lindsay said carefully, and he knew what she was going to say.

"Don't, Montana. Just don't. It ain't Flack back there."

She wisely said nothing.

Flack was his first real friend on the job, the first guy not to give a shit about his shady family connections. Flack had judged him for who he was, and he must have measured up, because soon he was inviting him for beers or games of pool after shift at Sullivan's. They'd broken balls-eight balls and each other's-and shot the shit and scoped the girls on Friday nights. Flack rarely went home with anyone, but he never seemed to mind when he-Danny-did. He just smirked and raised his glass in salute and went back to the ballgame on the big-screen TV over the bar.

They took in at least two ballgames a year together, and Flack always loaned him the _Sports Illustrated _swimsuit edition, always with the admonition not to leave anything sticky on the pages, dammit. He was a real wiseass, but if he said he had your back, he had your fucking back, even if that meant taking a bullet for you.

_So what the fuck are you doin'? _Louie demanded. _Turn this car around, pull up a chair, and watch his back._

_I can't, Lou, _he thought miserably. _I just-God help me, but I can't. I can't sit in there and look at him like that. It's too fuckin' soon, too, too fuck, fuckin-,_

_It's all about him, Lou, is what it is, _Sassone interjected. _Same as ever. It ain't about what somebody else needs; it's about what Danny Boy here can handle. Which is apparently not much. Hey, but don't worry; maybe you and Flack will be roomies on the same ward, and Messer here can pay his yearly duty visits to you both at the same time. Anything to make his life easier, you know?_

Sudden tears blurred his vision. "Shit," he blurted, and sat forward abruptly in his seat. "Oh, oh, shit." He scrubbed his face with his hands.

"Danny?" Lindsay was braking.

"Don't stop," he barked. "Just fuckin' drive, Monroe." The car accelerated again. "Oh, God, I'm sorry. "'M so, so sorry."

"You don't have to apologize to me, Danny," she said. "We're all on edge."

He smothered a bark of laughter with the heel of his hand. Of course she thought he was talking about her. In Montana's world, it was a population of one. He closed his eyes and turned his head so that he couldn't see her. If he did, he might start laughing in earnest and never stop, just laugh until he shook himself to pieces.

She didn't say another word until they were standing on the sidewalk in front of his building. "You want me to come up with you for a few minutes?" she offered, and rocked anxiously on the balls of her feet.

He rubbed his nape and shook his head. "Naw, I'm good. But thank you." He looked at her with a shifty, sidelong glance. He was fissured glass beneath overstretched skin, and one touch would shatter him.

"Are you-,"

"I'm sure. Really. What about you? You want me to walk you to the subway?" His earlier contempt for her had passed, and he was acutely aware of how small she was, how obviously not a New Yorker.

She shook her head. "I'll be fine."

"Sure?"

"Yeah.

"All right, then. G'night." He offered her a stiff wave and escaped into his building on legs that felt like stilts.

He made it to his apartment without knowing how he got there and stumbled into the kitchen without bothering to close the front door behind him. He opened his refrigerator and rummaged blindly inside it for a beer, and it wasn't until he'd drained half the bottle that his eyes focused on his surroundings.

The place was a mess. Old takeout cartons and newspapers littered the small kitchen table, and the garbage can bulged with used paper plates that served as his tableware. The air was stale with the scent of old pasta sauce.

_Flack'd be fuckin' horrified, _he thought glumly, and took another sip of beer.

'_Course he would, _Louie agreed. _Guy's a fuckin' neat freak. Even cleans his toilet on a regular basis. _

_Yeah, well, _Sonny sneered, _he ain't gonna be comin' around for a while. Maybe not ever._

The beer came up in a bitter rush, and he skidded to the sink with his mouth full of bile. He retched once, twice, and then his Heineken was splattering the stainless steel basin.

_What am I doin' here? _he thought numbly as he watched his vomit trickle sluggishly down the drain.

_What you always do, Messer, _Sonny said simply. _Runnin' away._

_Fuckin' asshole, Messer, _Flack said sadly.

For the first time in his life, Danny Messer could not deny the accusation. He rested his burning face against the cool steel of the sink and waited for the nausea to pass.


	2. Anger

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **This story contains spoilers for S1 and S2. Read at your own risk. keeps bunging up my formatting, so if there are no italics where they should be, my apologies.

Stella was not surprised that it was her and Mac who wound up holding vigil over Flack in the hospital hallway, clutching twin cups of coffee. Somehow it always came down to the two of them when everything went to hell, Captain America and his avenging Athena, and she found that reassuring even as she berated all the saints in the pantheon for bringing her back here to these ugly, green walls that smelled like medicine and repressed death. She took a sip of her coffee to mask the stink and the unwelcome memories it carried.

_The last time you were here, you were a couple floors down, getting a sterile, cotton swab jabbed into your vagina by a nurse with twitchy fingers, and Flack was pacing outside the door and pretending to be riveted by the out-of-date _Outdoor Life _magazine he'd found on one of the tables. The last time you were here, you had Frankie Mala's skin under your bloody, ragged fingernails, and you were trying desperately not to remember all the other places his DNA had been over the past few months. Mac was trying to figure out if you were a cold-blooded murderer, and Flack was trying to peel off your skin as gently as he could. The last time you were here, you were a victim, and you hated every minute of it._

Of course she'd hated it. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work. She caught the bad guys. She put them away. That was the deal she'd made with the Almighty on the day she'd decided to become a cop. Being a victim wasn't a part of the deal, never had been, and she couldn't help but feel a little gypped as she'd lain on that examination table with her legs in the stirrups and one of her colleagues a head-turn away from getting an eyeful.

_Since when has God ever driven a fair bargain? _asked a cynical, incredulous voice inside her head. As a child struggling to stay awake in the soporific silence of early-morning Mass, she'd been convinced it was the voice of the Devil, come to tempt her from the path of righteousness. As an adult, she'd come to realize it was the uninflected voice of reason.

_Since a quarter to never, that's when, _it went on. _You should have known that. You do know that. It's one of the first lessons the orphanage taught you. God wasn't fair. Life wasn't fair. It didn't matter how good you were or tried to be, how devoutly you read your prayer book or how deeply you curtseyed. Life had an unpleasant way of turning to shit. Just look at old Job if you need any proof. Poor bastard lived his life by the book with nary a hair out of place, and God still had no problem using him as a living betting chip. That should tell you all you need about God's sense of justice._

There was no justice. That's what life in the orphanage had taught her. Not really. Justice was revenge and retribution in fancy dress. If justice were real, she would never have grown up as a little girl lost, dressed in grey, wool skirts and knee-high socks to match and pretending that Mary Poppins was her mother and would come to rescue her someday. She would have known whether she looked like her mother or her father or both, and she wouldn't have spent the Resurrection Feast every Easter resenting Jesus because he might have been nailed to a cross, but at least he got thirty-three years with his mother first.

_That's the other reason you hate it here so much. It smells like the orphanage. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and the nuns, bless their black-habited hearts, had an abiding love of Pine Sol that bordered on the obscene. The whole place was awash in the cloying reek of synthetic pine needles. They even used it on the wooden pews of the small chapel, and sometimes, the smell was so acrid and pungent that your eyes would water. You'd sit in the pew, back ramrod-straight and ankles crossed, and breathe as shallowly as you could because the air burned in your nostrils and lungs. Pine Sol was the smell of penance and absolution._

_You hated that stink, and every time it was your turn to scrub the floors or clean the pews, you'd grit your teeth and swear like a sailor in that mental voice that not even the sharp-eared nuns could hear. There was no question of shirking your duty when it came; corporal punishment might have been banished to the days of yore in theory, but the ageless gestalt of the Holy Mother Church moved on its own time, and there still existed ancient nuns who thought nothing of bringing a ruler across the smarting skin of calf or knuckle._

_So, you got down on your hands and knees and crawled across the smooth wooden floor, a penitent making her way to absolution, trailing water and Pine Sol in your wake like blood. It was three and a half hours from start to finish, from one side of the chapel to the other, and by the time you dropped the sponge and brush into the bucket of dirty, soapy water, your knees throbbed and your shoulders burned with exertion. The sisters told you that idle hands were the Devil's workshop, and that hard work strengthened faith, and maybe that was true. For them, anyway. But all you ever felt after a morning of scrubbing the chapel was grungy and bone-tired and lonely._

_Your knees got the worst of it. From the ages of nine to eighteen, they wore perpetual bruises, and over the months and years of friction, they became thick-skinned and callused. Elephant wattles, the prim, Mary Poppins voice in your head would call them, and when you were a little girl, you'd giggle, because elephants were funny animals, big and lumbering and awkward on their dinner-plate feet. You knew this because the nuns had taken you and the rest of the children to the Central Park Zoo as a reward for good behavior in the summer after first grade. You'd seen all the animals as you'd wandered behind the nuns and jostled elbows and knees with an ugly, cow-licked, snaggle-toothed kid whose name you've long since forgotten, or maybe you never knew it in the first place. But the slow, tootling elephants were your favorite, and you lingered at their enclosure for so long that you earned a stern reprimand from Sister Edna, who seized your wrist in her bony, wattled vulture's talon and dragged you away._

_But the comparison wasn't so funny years later, when biological curiosity overrode the long-held theory that boys were the spawn of Satan with poisonous spines for privates. Then it was horrible, and you'd stand in front of the tarnished, full-length mirror in the girls' dormitory with your grey skirt hiked above your knees, turning this way and that in the feeble hope that a different angle of light would erase the hard calluses that the mirror reflected so pitilessly. It didn't, and you wound up standing there with your grey skirt-so like an elephant's hide when you considered it-bunched in your hands. In your more morbid moments, you imagined that what you were seeing wasn't a callus, but bone, that your knees had grown threadbare from years of scrubbing the wooden floors. A blasphemous part of you wondered what the knees of the nuns looked like beneath their skirts after all these years._

_Scullery-maid knees, you called them. Loveless, old nun-knees, and you were determined to get rid of them. The day the State of New York declared you an adult, you packed your bags, kicked the dust of St. Basil's from your heels, and never looked back. You'd been waiting for that day since you were old enough to know what you were missing, and you'd been saving toward a place of your own since you got your first job at fifteen, taking orders at a Tastee Freeze after school. You left without a fare thee well or a forwarding address, and that was the way you wanted it. Let your unhappy childhood rot in the dark corners of the cloister. The overwhelming stench of Pine Sol would cover it nicely._

_It didn't take you long to re-invent yourself. The scullery knees were the first to go, smoothed away by liberal and fanatical applications of scented moisturizing lotion. You threw away the dingy convent clothes permeated with the lingering memory of cleanser and weekends spent on your knees beneath the forbidding cross upon which all the sins of the rested, and bought clothes with bright colors and flattering cuts meant to accentuate the figure you used to examine so forlornly in front of the dormitory mirror. They made you look like a woman instead of a gangly, unisex child who had once prayed for Mary Poppins to spirit her away with her magical umbrella. You were sure that the plunging necklines on some of your choices would have scandalized the well-intentioned sisters who had so jealously guarded your virtue, and the thought was delicious._

_You enrolled at NYU and set about defining who you were and wanted to be. For a while, you dreamed of being a dancer and seeing your name up in lights on the Great White Way. Dance was graceful and intrinsically feminine, even when performed by men, and sheltered as you had been by the withering brides of Christ that were gradually eroding to sainted dust within the walls of St. Basil's, you were painfully aware of its simmering sensuality and its close kinship to sex, that most forbidden of all fruits._

_So you signed up for dance classes and joined the milieu of lithe bodies that pranced and pirouetted across small, dark stages that were years and miles from the hot, relentless lights of Broadway. During the day, you preened and flexed and high-kicked until your ankles and knees wept in time to the music, and at night, you smoked your first cigarette, drank your first beer, and lost your virginity to a guy with more talk than stamina. After it was over, you wondered what all the fuss was about and why the nuns had worked so hard to steer you clear of sins of the flesh. You figured out why a couple months later when you met a guy who knew what he was doing, and then sex was a vice in which you'd happily engage periodically for the rest of your life, but the rest you could take or leave. You tie one on now and then during the holidays, but you haven't touched a cigarette in twenty years._

_Eventually, your knees and ankles refused to cooperate no matter how much ibuprofen you dry-swallowed or how many shrieking muscles you numbed with ice, so you turned in your leotard and leg-warmers in search of a profession that couldn't be wrested away from you by the vagaries of time or the stiffening of joints. You'd had your fill of religion, and so you gravitated to the other end of the spectrum, to the hard, ruthless exactitude of science. Science was equal opportunity in all respects; the weight of a gram was the same whether you knew your parents or not, and unlike people, who were usually full of shit, science gave it to you straight._

_You might have ended up a botanist or a chemist, but you knew that all power sprang from the muzzle of a gun, and that's what you wanted. Power. Not to hurt anyone or play God, but just to make sure that nobody but you decided who you were going to be. Justice might have been a manmade concept that existed solely because people chose to believe it did, but it was a far cry better than the shitty job God the Father had been doing in his firmament. You couldn't wave your hand and make it so that no other kid grew up wondering who they were and where the hell they came from, and you couldn't stop people from making stupid choices, but you could make sure that no sin went unpunished._

_So, you headed for the academy armed with nothing but brains and determination. You busted your ass twice as hard as the next recruit in line, and you learned to ignore the snide sexual innuendoes and the not-so-subtle leers at your cleavage. You learned to bust heads and balls with equal impunity, and if some recruit got too grabby on the mat, you didn't hesitate to defend your personal boundaries with the snap of breaking fingers. It landed you in hot water with the academy brass a few times and earned you a reputation as a woman who didn't know how to play ball. You've gone to loggerheads with IAB half a dozen times since, and each time you have to deal with their condescending, ass-covering crap, you come out more determined than ever to not take any of their bullshit._

_You might hate St. Basil's, and you might even have a reason to, but that place made it possible to do this job. It toughened your soul the same way those wooden floors toughened the skin of your knees, by stripping away all the pretty artifice of childhood. You never had the luxury of thinking life was fair, so you weren't surprised by the tragedies that confronted you when you hit the streets with a badge and a gun. While other rookies were puking into the gutters at the scene of a nasty triple with blood and brains smeared on the walls and ceiling, you could observe it with a straight face. That God had a nasty habit of pulling the rug from underfoot when you least expected it was old news to you. You just took your notes and made your reports, and then you squared the brim of your hat, clapped on your sidearm, and caught the son of a bitch. That was all you could do._

_Besides, try as you might, it's not like you could forget all the lessons life in the orphanage taught you. They were sunk too deeply into your skin, embedded beneath it like a latent case of the shingles that never quite erupts. To this day, you cannot stand the scent of Pine Sol, and your own bathroom smells like citrus(and blood if you think about it for too long)._

_It taught you love of privacy above all. And space. You spent eighteen years sleeping on a narrow cot in a big room with thirty other girls. Nothing was hidden from curious eyes. Not the embarrassing red badge of puberty that accosted you in the middle of the night when you were twelve, and not the constant, nagging need to massage the soreness from your budding breasts. Colds and flus were shared along the ward like whispered secrets, and if one of the older, more brazen girls had braved the art of Touching Herself, the news rippled through the dorms with the speed of a snapping bedsheet. Not even dreams were secret if you had the misfortune to talk in your sleep. You didn't-at least not that you know of-but other girls did, and the night hours were filled with moans and whispers and cries as the ghosts came to drift down the aisles and rattle their chains at the dreaming._

_Privacy was and is your most cherished commodity. You like airy rooms to let in the light, but you have curtains to block out unwanted scrutiny and heavy doors separating each room from the next and you from the outside world. None of your apartments had to be big, but they all had to have doors separating one room from another. It's a requirement that borders on the pathological if you ever cared to admit that to yourself. You've got all kinds of quirks that mark you as a State kid. Like throwing away clothes the minute they start to fade or grow drab, to turn grey like the lackluster plumage of a baby penguin. Or your stubborn refusal to wear socks that come any higher than your ankles._

_They're all hallmarks of who you were and never wanted to be, so you don't acknowledge them, but they're there all the same. You can change your clothes and your hair and cultivate a set of balls to rival those found on the egotistical pricks on the Vice Squad, but underneath the skin, you're always going to be Stella Bonasera, a little girl in a grey, wool skirt who knew better than to talk to strangers and somehow found one standing in the middle of her kitchen anyway._

An image arose in her mind of Frankie standing in her kitchen, living shadow in the brightness of the room. It had been such a shock to see him there with his broad sculptor's hands full of takeout bags. Anger had come a moment later, white and hot as phosphorous in her veins, but for a few precious seconds, she had been rooted to the spot by surprise.

It was the audacity of it that galled her the most, the presumptuousness of it that still stung and burned beneath her skin and on her tongue like rancid vinegar. He had invaded her most private space as though he had every right to be there just because he had a cock between his legs, and it didn't matter that she'd never extended the invitation. He had assumed it was his because he had been so sure she was his, and she often wondered if the glimmer of shock she'd seen in his eyes just before she pulled the trigger hadn't been so much shock at the realization of his death as outrage that she'd one-upped him.

_It's his eyes that have troubled you the most, isn't it, Stella, dear? _said a prim voice that reminded her of Sister Ertrude, the Mother Superior that had presided over St. Basil for most of her time there. _You read once that the eyes were the windows to the soul, and as practical and pragmatic as you turned out to be in most other aspects of your life, that bit of fancy has always stuck with you, just like a rescuing Mary Poppins did when you were little. Maybe it spoke to a part of you that wasn't as jaded as the rest, the part that still believes in good and happily ever after and the possibility, however remote, that justice might really exist, after all._

Sister Ertrude replaced Frankie on the canvas of her mind, though the takeout cartons he'd been carrying inexplicably remained, arrayed on the smooth, wooden surface of her desk like cheap chess pieces on a squareless board.

_Probably the only hunk of wood in the whole damn place that I never dusted, scrubbed, or polished, _she thought morbidly.

_Language, Miss Bonasera_, Sister Ertrude chided, but there was no threat in it, no ominous crack of wood on papery palm. In fact, she sounded faintly amused, and a furtive smile twitched in the thin corners of her colorless lips. Her thin fingers were interlaced on the desktop, half-hidden by the cluster of cartons, and her habit framed her face like a Pharoah's ceremonial headdress.

_Whatever the reason, _she went on kindly, _you were obsessed with the idea for a while. While the other girls studied the boys' faces and hair and derrieres, you found yourself riveted by their eyes. You studied them every chance you could, over the battered tops of books or under the pretense of wiping specks of dirt from their cheeks. You were convinced that you could tell the kind of men they would become if you could only meet their gaze. It was a child's notion, inexpertly employed, and yet, the forensic psychology textbooks you read bore it out. A wealth of information was contained in the eyes for those who knew how to look for it-love and hate and indifference, madness or cold sanity, cunning or deception. The mouth of Man is imbued with Satan's forked tongue, but the eyes cannot lie. It's a belief that has served you well in your life, and it's why you always look a suspect in the eyes. Sometimes, they hold the only truth when the evidence is slow in coming. A good look into a man's eyes has spared you a great deal of grief and heartache over the years. _

_Oh, but Frankie was a rude awakening, wasn't he? Your time-tested hypothesis was obliterated in that kitchen. The eyes staring back at you weren't the same eyes that you had seen by candlelight, the same eyes that could find beauty in a single brushstroke on canvas or a line of clay on a sculpture. They were lifeless eyes, cinder eyes pressed into a vacantly grinning face. They were so fundamentally _wrong _that you wondered how you could possibly have missed it. It was your job to notice things like that._

_You wondered it again when he was looming over you in your own bathtub, smiling that terrible, empty smile and speaking in that low, too-rational voice that promised more than conciliatory kisses over dinner. It was the voice of lunacy and serial killers, and it turned your stomach to think that you had kissed that mouth that seemed to have sprouted too many teeth, that you had allowed the same hands that had forced you into your own bathtub to trace illicit, possessive lines over your most exposed, secret flesh. It was disgusting and violating, and as you sawed through your flexcuffs with the unprotected edge of your razor and felt your blood dripping into your spotless tub, fear and confusion was replaced by righteous indignation._

_Everyone thinks that shooting him was the worst part, that the report of those three shots is what torments your dreams and keeps you up at night, but it's not. You hear the echo of those shots with every step you take in high heels and in every slam of your locker door in the labs, it's true, but what haunts you are the questions that came afterward, the doubts that Flack unwittingly seeded in your mind when he pulled up a chair beside your bed, flipped open his notebook, and asked you in his gentlest yet most professional voice what happened in your apartment._

_For every answer you supplied, he raised three more questions, ones you hadn't had time to consider. Was your door unlocked when you got home? Any idea how Frankie could have gained access to your apartment or keys without your knowledge? Did you, at any time, notice that your keys were missing or otherwise moved from where you'd left them? Was there any sign that this Mala guy was a whackjob? All standard questions, questions you've asked shaken victims yourself, but you couldn't resist a needling resentment that the tables had been turned._

_Not that you'd ever admit it, especially not to Flack, who was only doing his job, and who, for all his swagger and bluster on the streets, was remarkably sensitive to his friends. If he even suspected that he'd hurt you, he'd ride himself unmercifully for months on end. Besides, you'd rather suck it up than spend the rest of your career with your friends walking on eggshells. So you kept your mouth shut._

Sister Ertrude peered into one of the takeout boxes on her desk. _Sweet and sour pork. My favorite, you know. _Then, ruefully, _Damn. It's Lent._

Frankie again, eyes blank and face stony as he raised the gun. Three blood roses blooming on the white of his shirt just before the world spiraled to black. Bang. Bang. Bang. She closed her eyes against the memory, and her fingers closed spasmodically around the heavy cardboard of her coffee cup.

"Stella." Mac's voice, grating and weary. "Stella?' His fingers on her forearm.

She blinked to clear her head and forced her fingers to relax. "Hmm? What's up, Mac?"

Mac shrugged. "Nothing. You just looked a little lost there for a minute." His voice was calm, but his eyes were tense and bloodshot, and he was pale and bruised in the harsh, fluorescent lighting of the hallway.

She took a sip of coffee and grimaced. It was cold and gritty. Apparently, she'd been drifting longer than she'd thought. "I'm okay, Mac," she assured him, and patted his hand. "I'm just-," She shrugged in turn and wiped her burning, tired eyes with the heel of one hand. "It's just been a long day that's only getting longer."

"You don't need to stay here, Stella. Go home. Get some rest. I'll call you if anything changes."

She dismissed the suggestion with an emphatic shake of her head. "No way, Mac. I'm here for the long haul."

Mac knew better than to argue. He simply looked at her for a moment in speculative silence before nodding and sitting back in his chair. "All right, then," he said. "But if you change your mind-," He left the sentence unfinished.

She mustered a wan smile for him. "I know, Mac. Thanks." She patted his shoulder.

Leaving was out of the question, and it didn't matter how exhausted she was or how leaden her arms and legs felt. She owed it to Flack to stay here until his family turned up or until he opened his eyes, whichever came first. It was the least she could do, and Flack would have done the same for her had the situations been reversed.

_He has done the same, _Sister Ertrude pointed out matter-of-factly. She was still behind her desk now, but the takeout cartons were blessedly absent. _He rode with you in the ambulance on the way to the ER, and he stayed with you even after his job as a detective was over. He could have left after he took your statement, but he didn't. He lingered in the hallways and pretended to be fascinated by the dreadful watercolor art that adorned the walls or the ancient, crumbling magazines. He puttered an aimless beat outside your door. _

_He never said it, but he worried for you. It was in his eyes, so dark and full of outrage and sorrow on your behalf, and in the way he stuck his head into your room at regular intervals to see if you needed anything. He brought you three boxes of tissues because he never remembered bringing you the first one. Sometimes, he just came into the room and sat, hands folded loosely between his knees. He never tried to engage in small talk or cheer you up. He just…sat. It was his way of letting you know he had your back, and it made your chest ache._

_He was the one who told you that you were in the clear with IAB, and he was practically dancing when he delivered the news, a kid who'd gotten to open the biggest present first on Christmas morning. He helped you into your coat and wrapped you in a gentle hug, and in that moment, you could gladly have kissed him because you knew he was good people._

_He offered to drive you to a hotel, but you insisted on going home. You weren't going to let Frankie take your home from you on top of everything else. You could tell from the set of his jaw that he thought that was a terrible idea, but he didn't push. He just helped you into the car and got into the driver's seat. Halfway home, he offered to let you stay at his place for the night until Crime Scene Clean-up had expunged all traces of the boogeyman from your carpet, tub, and walls, and you were tempted because Flack was safe, and there would be someone to talk to if the ghost of Frankie Mala found its way into your dreams. But you had your pride, and to back out now would smack of being a damsel in distress, so you gritted your teeth, squared your shoulders, and told him to keep driving._

_He drove you home and walked you to your door, and then he sidled there. He asked you if you wanted him to stay, and you told him no and shut the door in his face. You could still hear him pacing in the hallway for several minutes thereafter, and even after you knew he was gone, you sensed him down on the street, standing on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat as he watched your window._

_You made sure he was gone before you conceded defeat, packed a bag, and left the apartment to the blood you could still smell beneath the Comet and bleach the cleaning techs had used to blot it from the carpet and tub, and the peppery tickle of cordite, anger distilled into breath. You didn't want him to see you running away with your tail between your legs. When you casually mentioned to Mac that you'd decided to move a few weeks later, Flack's only reaction was to blink once, and then ask if you wanted anything from his coffee run._

Here in the hostile light of the hospital, she had to admit that Flack hadn't been her first thought when the apartment building detonated with the bellowing roar of crumbling stone. It was Mac she'd thought of. Mac, who could be so damn single-minded when he was on the trail that he didn't see the shadows encroaching from the rear. He'd nearly been crushed by a cargo container at the Port Authority once because he was too busy sinking his teeth into a suspect to notice the rumble of imminent calamity. Mac waited for the truth, but when it came, he went in hard and without hesitation, and it had been all too easy for her to imagine him trying to dismantle the bomb with his teeth and a Swiss Army knife because he was damned if he was going to see another innocent soul suffer under his watch.

She had assumed Flack would be fine because he was always fine. He was solid as a rock under his clothes, and he was cool under fire. She'd seen him wrestle perps twice his size into weeping submission and do it with a mesmerizing, giddy joie de vivre, as though wrangling murderers and perverts to the dirty precinct floor was an honor to be savored. Flack was one of the good ones, and she'd never had any doubts that he was going to make it to his pension and then some.

So when she'd seen that pale, convulsing figure strapped to the gurney and registered who it was, her heart had dropped into her knees, and she'd felt gut-punched. "Oh, my God," was all she could say. Then Mac was limping out of the rubble with dirt and blood on his face and hands, and there hadn't been time for anything else. Mac wasn't going to stop until the bastard who'd spilled Flack's blood and killed six others was in custody. So she'd followed in his wake like a baying hound, and whenever she was sure she was too tired to take another step, she only had to picture that twitching body on the gurney.

If she turned her head, she could see Flack through the glass wall of his room. He wasn't convulsing anymore, thank God, but he was still bloodless and fragile and too white against the sheets. Maybe it was because she was used to seeing him in a suit and tie, but the explosion had diminished him. He was smaller than she could ever remember, a child's toy swatted by a careless hand and forgotten where he lay. Her throat constricted.

"Have you called his parents?" she asked Mac suddenly.

He did not tear his gaze from the figure on the bed when he spoke. "Twice."

"Then where the hell are they?" she demanded. It was almost frantic.

Now Mac did look at her. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with deep bruises of exhaustion, but his voice was strong and even. "I'm sure they'll be here, Stella. They might not have gotten the message yet."

She took a deep breath and forced her jaw to unclench. Mac was right and perfectly reasonable, of course, but…

_But it's not right. It's not fair, _Sister Ertrude finished for her. _Every child should have the love of his parents to fall back on when the rest of the world goes to hell. It's the one constant, the one great, universal truth to a child. Your parents love you even if no one else will or can. You've seen it a thousand times. Mothers of junkies dredged out of the Hudson or Long Island Sound weep bitter tears for the angels they've lost, and so do the mothers of child-killers and rapists. There's no love in the world like mother love, and the lack of it is devastating._

_You know what it's like because you've lived it. They say you can't mourn what you don't know you've lost, but that's-if you'll pardon my corrupted Latin, dear-bullshit. You knew very well what you had lost, been denied, and it pissed you off. Never did you feel its absence more acutely than when you were sick. Then all you wanted was your mother._

_When you were six, you contracted chicken pox, and the sisters put you in quarantine to keep it from spreading. You burned with fever and itched all over, and it was the loneliest week of your life. The sisters tried; they were overworked, not callous, but no matter how often they came to sing or smooth your sweaty hair from your hot forehead or how much calamine lotion they smeared over the pox, it never quelled the voracious itch. Their hands were gentle and well-intentioned, but they were not your mother's hands, and they did not possess a mother's magic. So you cried and cried, and at night, you prayed for a mother with Mary Poppins' face to come and make it better._

_You learned to live with it eventually, learned to navigate around the gaping hole in the fabric of your life. You papered over it with grim practicality and steely-eyed resolve. _What's done is done, and no amount of whining will change it, _you told yourself, and soldiered on._

_You were right, absolutely right, but the reality of it still rests uneasily on your bones, a dress three sizes too large or two sizes too small. Sometimes, it chafes your skin like the starched wool of your orphanage socks, and it's an effort of will not to lash out at the oblivious, Fifth Avenue parents who treat their children like status symbols or inconvenient pets to be boarded the minute the novelty wears off._

_Flack needs his mother now. He _deserves _her now. If some rotting, hollow-eyed junkie merits sobbing hysteria, then so does he. He ought to have her in there holding his hand and stroking his face and pressing dry, trembling kisses to his forehead. She should be in there telling him childhood bedtime stories or just praying for his life while the beads of the rosary dripped through her fingers like tears. But he's alone in that room, encased in glass like a medical museum exhibit, and his parents don't even have the luxury of being dead._

She studied Flack through the glass, lips pressed into a thin line to keep her growing fury locked behind her gritted, grinding teeth. The nasal canula feeding him oxygen stood in sharp relief against his pallid skin, and his eyelashes were oil drops on alabaster as they fluttered. His lips were parted just enough to offer a hint of his teeth. His arms were arranged perfectly at his sides, and his broad hands were slack and limp on the thin blanket. He was utterly helpless.

She swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee and set the cup by her feet. _If I find out they couldn't be bothered to cut short a trip to Atlantic City, I'll-, _She let the thought hang. She didn't know what she'd do, but the thought of it burned in her veins like a shot of iodine.

Now that she considered it, she knew very little about Flack's family. That his father was a lionized legend of the NYPD was a matter of public record, but beyond that, Flack kept his mouth shut on the subject of his roots. He turned up at the labs for the parties on Christmas and New Year's Eve to raid the olives and the prosciutto cold cuts and squabble with Danny over the baseball superiority of the Yankees to the Mets. More often than not, he'd pour himself into a cab at the end of the night, happily drunk and bellowing at Danny not to forget what he fuckin' said, didja hear, Messer?

She'd asked him why he wasn't with his family once a few Christmas Eves ago. She hadn't meant to pry; God knew she had her own secrets to tend. She had just been curious as to why he would want to spend the holiday with the Nerd Squad when his father was alive and well in Yonkers.

"Hey, Flack," she'd said as she'd sidled up to the bar for another martini. "You mind if I ask you something?"

Flack, who was buzzed but not yet drunk, had raised his glass to his lips and taken a sip of his rum and Coke. "Sure, Stel." He'd crunched a piece of ice between his teeth.

"What are you doing here?" She'd gestured around the room at the CSIs. Some of the lab techs were still in their coats.

His brow had furrowed in confusion, and he'd set his drink on the bar. "What do you mean? There somewhere I should be? Some rule about cops minglin' with the Nerd Squad?" He'd been smiling, but his voice was wary, even a trifle hurt.

She'd shaken her head. "Of course not. We know you liven up any party." She'd shrugged. "I just thought you'd want to spend Christmas with your family."

His smile had faded, and those brilliant, blue eyes had dimmed. He'd picked up his glass and drained it. "You don't need to worry about that, doll. I'm right where I wanna be tonight. I'll see my family tomorrow down at the stone garden," he'd muttered, and signaled for another.

She'd opened her mouth to ask what the hell _that _meant, but he'd shaken his head. "I gotta go, Stel," he'd said abruptly, and taken the drink that had come sliding down the bar. A few seconds later, he'd threaded seamlessly into the crowd, and the next time she'd seen him, he'd been picking listlessly at the olive tray while Danny harangued him about girls always wanting jewelry for Christmas. There had been no merry bellowing at the end of the night. There hadn't even been a cab. Flack had walked home, weaving unsteadily over the icy sidewalk with his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat and his muffler tucked haphazardly around his mouth and nose. She'd been tempted to follow him, if for no other reason than to make sure he got home without busting his face, but in the end, she'd let him go. She'd been sure he would be pissed at her, but when they returned to work the day after Christmas, everything was okay.

_You saw Flack, Sr. once, _a voice said suddenly. _At a police barbecue, one of those meet the public campaigns cooked up by the brass to improve the department image with the public. Normally, you gave them a miss, but Aiden wanted to go as an excuse to girl-talk on the clock, and it wasn't so bad once you got there. You and Aiden settled down under a tree with watered-down lemonade and gossiped about the latest crop of rookies while you watched Flack and Danny kick the ball around with a bunch of neighborhood kids. Flack on one team, Danny on the other, and they were doing a heroic job of keeping it clean, considering the both had mouths like longshoremen when competition was involved._

_Flack was sweaty and happy and careful not to jostle the kids as he moved over the grass. It was funny to see him dressed in shorts, with those bony, Irish knees peeking from beneath the hems like newborn vulture chicks, sparsely haired and knobbly. Danny was leaner, and his knees were in better shape, but he paused every few minutes to push his sliding glasses onto the bridge of his nose._

_The game was winding down when Flack, Sr. showed up, shadow stretching across the grass like blight. You knew who he was without having to ask, because Flack was his father's son. The same eyes, the same square jaw. Even the same mouth. Sr. was greyer than his namesake, and heavier, but he carried himself with the same swagger._

_Flack was crouched in the grass, trying to teach a four-year-old how to kick the ball, when his father's shadow loomed over him._

Hey, son, _his father said, and rocked on the balls of his feet._

_Flack froze, and his head came up by torturous degrees, as if he didn't want to see who was standing there._

Hey, Pop, _he said stiffly, and rocked back on his own heels, a plant drawing away from noxious, lethal night._

_A strained half-smile. _Gotta minute? Just to talk?

_Flack studied his father, jaw twitching. His eyes narrowed and darted to Danny, but he was already retreating, hand rubbing furiously at his grimy, sunburned nape. Danny would not be riding to the rescue._

Yeah. All right. _He turned to the little boy, who was whacking resolutely at the ball with one small, sneakered foot. _Hey, see my friend, Danny, over there? _He pointed at Messer, who had taken refuge beneath a tree in the hopes that its branches would hide him from the sun and the conversation brewing before him. _Why don't you go ask him to help you keep practicin', and I'll be over to see how you're doin' in a few minutes, all right?"

_The boy nodded and scampered off, leaving Flack alone with his father. Danny turned his head as if he were watching something unseemly, and Aiden went off in search of the oatmeal cookies in which she had previously had no interest. You knew you should excuse yourself, too, but you couldn't. You could only watch in morbid fascination._

_You remember a lot of things from that stilted conversation on the grass of Central Park. Like the way they never touched each other, not even to shake hands or clap each other on the shoulder. In fact, Flack spent most of the time backing away from his father, trying to stay in the light and warmth of the sun. They were stiff soldier-boys on opposite sides of an invisible line, and Flack stiffened whenever his father's shadow touched him._

_You also remember wondering just why in the hell Flack, Sr. was wearing his dress blues to an informal barbecue in June. It was in immaculate condition, but it was too tight around the middle, and the shiny, brass buttons looked dull and fake, cheap, costume jewelry on expensive wool._

_But what you remember most is the way Flack looked when he first saw his father standing over him. It wasn't pleasure or respect or even indifference. It was irritation and a flash of something darker and more virulent. For just a minute before his face smoothed to careful blankness, you saw hatred. You still remember the way he looked, crouching on the grass, swallowed by his father's ravenous shadow. Small and tired and defenseless. Just like now. _

Suddenly, she didn't want to sit there anymore. She wanted to move, to think and clear her head. She stood abruptly. "I'm going to take a walk, get some air. You want to come?"

Mac shook his head. "No, I'm good."

"I think there's a vending machine down the hall. I know you're not one for chocolate, but I think I saw some apples in it."

Mac grunted. "Considering that they've probably been there since '74, I think I'll pass."

"All right, then. I'll be back in a few."

She set off down the hall and willed herself to let her mind go blank, to concentrate on nothing but the sensation of movement in the soles of her feet and the flexion of her muscles as they moved. It was a calming technique she had learned in an interpretive dance class in her college days, and she had relied on it heavily to get her through particularly tough cases. It allowed her mind to filter out the white noise of her life and focus on the pertinent details of a case.

That was the theory anyway, but ever since Frankie had tainted her life and left himself behind on her former bedroom carpet, it never seemed to work. With every click of her heels on asphalt or concrete or the lab linoleum, she heard the click of her hammer as she turned off the safety and the definitive boom of three shots to the chest. Click. Boom. Boom. Boom.

_It shouldn't be surprising, dear. _Sister Ertrude was back. _Our unfortunate Mr. Mala has infested everything in your life like pestilence. Even moving hasn't helped, and how could it when you carry him everywhere you go like a perverse relic? You tell yourself that you want to forget him, and you do. You hate him so much that he inspires a dull nausea in your gut if you think about him too long. You hate him and all that he represents, but you cannot let him go. Every time he begins to recede, you find yourself questioning a vic or a suspect and wondering if you're missing something, some vital clue that you should see but can't. He lives on in every moment that you doubt yourself._

_You see him everywhere. In the dark corners of your apartment, and in the rumpled dune of clothes around your laundry hamper. You hesitate before you unlock the door to your apartment, and when you step inside, you sniff the air for smells that don't belong-cordite and blood and cologne. You check the tub for blood spatter each time you step into it. There's no reason to, of course, but you have to. You have to be sure. You can't help it._

_You don't tell anyone this, especially not the department shrink, but you can't shake the feeling that some of them know anyway. Not Mac-he's oblivious as a post, bless him-but Danny maybe, and definitely Flack, who goes out of his way to sprinkle extra jokes into his conversation. Even Lindsay has tried, in her fumbling way, to help, though you sometimes find her perkiness grating so early in the morning._

Past the vending machine, which squatted against its wall like a forgotten and ignored peddler. _Click. _Past the nurses' station, with its blinking bank of monitors ready to sound the alarm should one of their charges try to slip away in the night. _Boom._ Past the blandly inquisitive face of a duty nurse. _Boom. _Past glass-walled rooms of individual sorrow. _Boom._ And all of it was tinged red.

She stumbled into the nearest bathroom and stood clutching the counter in a drunken, white-knuckled grip. It was mercifully deserted, and she gulped a steadying lungful of air and willed her galloping heart to slow. The air tasted of Pine Sol, naturally, and she laughed, a brittle, cracked sound that echoed off the tile walls.

"Jesus," she muttered. "Get a grip, Stella," she told herself, but there was no force behind it.

_I do have a grip, _her mind responded with lunatic cheer. _Right here on the countertop. With both hands._

She gave an indelicate snort of laughter and turned on the tap. Water gushed into the basin, and she cupped her hands beneath the flow, filled them, and brought them to her mouth. The water was cold and metallic.

_Pine Sol, _she thought. _This is what Pine Sol would taste like, _and spit it out with a grimace.

She splashed it on her face and neck and rubbed it into her tired, burning eyes. She studied herself in the smudged mirror over the sink and was shocked at how gaunt she looked, how pale. Her cheekbones were sharp juts beneath her skin, and her eyes were gritty and hollow and more bruised than Mac's, a feat she would not have believed possible. Her hair was a mass of straggling frizz, and her dress, so crisp when the shift had started an eternity ago, was rumpled and listless on her frame, and covered in dust and minute flecks of masonry.

She smiled ruefully at her reflection. "No chance at Miss New York today," she told herself.

"Aw, now I think you're being too hard on yourself, Bonasera," said a voice from behind her.

She whirled to see Frankie Mala standing by the tampon dispenser. He was grinning at her with blood-blackened teeth and swaying like a cobra.

"You may not be pretty, but you're one tough broad," he said, and she heard the wet, rattling wheeze of blood in his lungs. "You put three in me okay." His grin widened, and he took a shambling half-step forward.

_The blood on his shirt is still red, _she thought with stupefied detachment. _It should be black like the blood on his teeth, but it's not. It's still red. In fact, it's still wet._

It was, in fact, dripping onto the tile floor with a wet _plip_. Frankie looked down and then at her again. His eyes were dead and clouded as tiger's eye marbles. He shrugged, a horribly slow, stiff movement of shoulder that creaked like untended hinges.

"Hey, what can I say? Death is messy. It cleans up easily enough, though, doesn't it? You know that, too. Those crime scene guys had me out of there in about three hours. No fuss, no muss, just poof. I was out of your life. Except I'm never gonna be out. Not really. I told you we'd be together forever, and here I am."

"And I told _you_, Frankie," she snarled, "to fuck off."

_He's not real, _Sister Ertrude said calmly.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten, and when she opened them again, he was gone, as was the blood on the floor. Her shoulders drooped, and she let out a ragged breath and ran her fingers through her hair.

"Bastard," she swore savagely. Then, to herself, "Get a fucking grip, Bonasera. Right now. This is not about you."

No, it wasn't. It was about Flack, who had very nearly made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty, and who was lying in a hospital bed with no one to watch over him but an old warhorse Marine and a woman who had called him friend too casually until now.

She squared her shoulders, set her chin, and strode towards the bathroom door. _Click._ Gunmetal on her thumb.

She bent down and pulled off her shoes. She contemplated throwing them away, but decided against it. She adored them, and she was damned if Frankie was going to rip out another thread from the ravaged fabric of her life, even a thread as trivial as a good pair of shoes. She stepped out into the hallway with the shoes in one hand, the linoleum floor cold and soothing on her stockinged feet.

Mac had succumbed to sleep by the time she returned to Flack's room. His head rested against the glass, and one arm lay across the back of the chair. He looked thin and utterly wasted in the unflattering light, suddenly old, with too many lines around his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. She wondered just how much the explosion had taken out of him, and if he still heard the resounding boom that came at the end of the world.

She thought about waking him, but didn't see the point. Flack's condition was unchanged, and Mac needed rest. Besides, if she woke him, she would have to explain why she was mincing across the floor with her shoes in her hand like a kid trying to sneak past her watchful father after curfew. So she let him sleep and slipped into Flack's room.

"Hey, Flack," she said softly, and tried to ignore the fact that the smell of Pine Sol was stronger here, as though the nurses were trying to smother the odor of imminent death.

Flack did not stir, and the only response was the monotonous beep of the cardiac monitor mounted on the wall above his head. She padded to his bedside and reached out her hand to smooth away a stray lock of hair. Flack would hate to be disheveled _and _sick. His flesh was too pale and too cool underneath her fingers, not warm and vital like it had been when he'd told her Frankie hadn't cost her her job on top of everything else.

This was not her friend, this pale, dying thing. Her friend was strong and young, and would eat anything once, including the kitchen sink.

_Except for fried spiders. He drew the line there. _

_Yes, it is your friend, _Sister Ertrude said with the implacable voice of conscience. _But he's not dead yet. He still stands on the thread of God's grace, and there's still a chance to call him back._

She pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat, shoes dangling from the end of her fingertips like a lantern in the dark. She searched her mind for the right words to say to someone who might be waiting for a voice in the night to call them home. Nurturing had never been her strong point. She was good at fixing problems, not tending to the messy aftermath.

She was tempted to say the rosary for him, a simple repetition that would never change no matter how many times she said it, a string of ageless words he could follow into the light, but she had no idea if he was Catholic, and she had no desire to inflict her moldering religious convictions on a captive audience. Besides, her rosary was at home in the junk drawer of her kitchen, buried beneath rubber bands and paper clips and an old tube of lipstick.

She slipped her hand into his cold, limp one. "Hey, Flack?" she said at last. "Did I ever tell you the one about the Greek Orthodox priest and the Vegas hooker? So, anyway, this Greek Orthodox priest goes to Vegas on vacation, and while he's there…"


	3. Bargaining

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

Montana was, at its heart, a paradox, one Lindsay Monroe had always understood intuitively. It was a state of sprawling, wide-open spaces that stretched as far as the eye could see and then some, and on clear days, you could turn your face to the sky and see endless swaths of blue tinged with the faintest wisps of white cloud. You could close your eyes and draw a deep breath and smell earth and parched green and sweetgrass that tickled your nose with the promise of a sneeze.

As a little girl, she'd done just that, stood in the sun with her arms spread and her face and palms upturned to its warmth. She would stand that way for as long as she could, until sweat prickled and beaded on her scalp and forehead or her mother called her inside. She would stand that way, feet planted in the dry dirt of her front yard, and think, _Look, Mama, I'm growing. Just like the plants on your windowsill. _

She'd felt like she was growing, too. If she concentrated, she could feel the furtive stretch and ripple of growing muscle and the more ponderous, patient creep of growing bone. The blood warmed and her fingers grew longer and longer, until she was sure she could touch the sun if she wanted. On her best days, days when her mother was too busy in the kitchen to scold her, she imagined that she had taken flight, that she had sloughed her body like old wool and was soaring among the cotton-candy clouds. Near the end, just before she opened her eyes and returned to earth and reality with a dull, bone-jarring thud, she'd stand on tiptoe and reach for the heavens until her back and calves were taut and thrumming with warning. She wasn't Lindsay; she was a linden tree, and she was beautiful.

There were wildflowers to pick and blades of sweetgrass to pluck and suck between your teeth until your mouth and tongue were gritty and bitter with it. There were creeks to wade in and fish to catch in the still pond on Farmer Milligan's back ten. You couldn't eat them-they were too small, and their meat was stringy-but you could waste an entire summer afternoon with your bare feet and the bobber from your cane pole floating dreamily in the murky, brown water. Most of the time, nothing bit, but if it did, you cut it loose and tossed it back in and left it to swim its unending circuit until the next time somebody wandered by with a hook and a pole and some time to kill.

If that didn't appeal, there was always the barn, cool and hot all at once. You could go in there and hide from the sun and watch the dust motes dance and spill secrets in their Divine, unknowable language. You could smell hay and horseshit and horsehide, and if you'd finished your household chores, you could saddle up and trot across the fields.

It was lonely, but it wasn't necessarily a _bad _loneliness. It just meant you had to learn to entertain yourself, to invent games for one and play three roles at once. Imaginations could grow strong and lush in Montana, as boundless as the land that had brought them forth and brought them up.

But…it wasn't quite true. The land that at first glance seemed so limitless was a patchwork quilt of fields and fences, barbed wire and rough-hewn wood posts. Titles and land deeds were sacrosanct, and those who failed to respect property lines learned to respect the end of a gun. When they weren't squabbling with each other or watching the government with ill-concealed unease, the ranchers were doing battle with the coyotes that skulked at the edges of their herds with teeth bared and bellies rumbling.

Montana folk were hard and craggy as the land on which they lived. The hot summers weathered their faces and turned their skin to cured leather, and the howling winters bent their backs against the wind. They were grim and practical, and they viewed anyone without calluses on their palms as suspicious. They went to church on Sunday without fail, and during her childhood in Bozeman, the feel of cotton was as familiar as the rough caress of denim on her knees. In Montana, there was a place for everything, and everything in its place, and there was no room for those who couldn't or didn't fit in.

_Which is why you jumped at the chance to leave, _said a voice inside her head that reminded her of her Aunt Ida, and in her mind's eye, she saw her standing at her kitchen counter, wiping her work-roughened hands on a dishtowel. _Big as Montana was, it still felt small and provincial and cramped. Folks' skins had shrink-wrapped around their bones, stunted their minds. Their ideas were small, and too many folks lived life by rote, doing things because that's the way they had always been done, and they never stopped to wonder why._

_They went to the same church their parents and grandparents did, passed down family recipes on yellowing index cards and dressed their subsequent children in the hand-me-down clothes of the first. They recorded deaths and births in the family Bible and promptly named children in their honor. Though the faces be forgotten, the names live on forever and ever, amen._

_Boys played high school football and lived out the dreams of their fathers, who had hung up their dreams with their cleats and turned in their jockstraps for a welder's mask or a deputy's star. Girls vied for the glitter of the homecoming crown and shared lipstick and gossip in the school bathrooms, puckering their lips and batting their eyelashes in an invitation that would lead them to broad hips and stretch marks before they were twenty-five. The more daring ones wore stilettos and went parking on Friday nights with a six-pack and a pack of Luckies._

_Those girls never got married. They wound up living in trailers on the city limits and working as cocktail waitresses in some sleazy liquor joint, serving beam to cowboys with dirty money and grabby hands. No, marriage was for the good girls, the ones who kept their knees closed until after graduation, or better yet, until the wedding night._

_Girls were supposed to settle down and tend home and hearth. Community college was okay, provided you got a sensible degree, like a teacher's certificate or maybe even library science. If you were really gutsy, you could be a bank teller, but if you reached for anything more, people said you were getting above your raising and forgetting where you came from. People who did that died long before they quit breathing in the eyes of their neighbors. The infamous blue wall of silence has nothing on the impenetrability of small-town excommunication._

_But you, my Lindy, you were different. Curious as all get out from the minute you figured out you could turn your head inside your crib. The world outside your baby bed fascinated you. So did the world inside it, for that matter. You studied your feet and toes as soon as you could lift them, and you spared no sense in your investigation. You mouthed them for taste and gummed them for texture, and for an extra bonus, you jammed your fat baby soles under your nose and sniffed. My old woman's hips still cry just thinking about it._

_Once you started to crawl, there was no stopping you, and you were a nightmare on four limbs. You got into everything because to you, everything was a mystery to be solved, though back then, your forensic methods consisted of squeezing the evidence in your chubby fists or gumming it into submission. Once, you ate half a jar of vaseline before I got it away from you, and you were pleased as punch, grinning up at me from the floor with petroleum jelly slathered on your chin. I was in a panic and wanted to take you to the hospital, but your Uncle John just took one look at you over the top of his newspaper, scratched his chin, and said he guessed your mama wouldn't need to jam that infant suppository up your pipe anymore. I was furious, but you laughed and clapped your slimy hands, and damned if he wasn't right. _

_You always wanted to know everything, and there was no length you wouldn't go to in order to figure it out. You liked the library in town, of course, loved to curl up in the big, squashy chairs and flip through the pages of the encyclopedia, but you also liked first-hand experience. You liked to _do _as much as you liked to _see_, and if there was an experiment to conduct, you were quick to oblige. _

_When you were small, one of your first forays into scientific inquiry concerned mud and a pair of freshly-laundered socks. You wanted to see the difference between mud on socked feet and bare, and so you dressed one foot in your best church socks and trouped out to the mudhole behind your house. First one foot and then the other, over and over again. The mud was cool and squelchy between your toes, and strangely comforting. You scrunched them together and wiggled them apart and watched the mud and silt ooze between them. The sock was sodden and heavy, and you were watching the mud climb the fabric with its cool, liquid fingers to slip inside and slither against your skin when your mama caught wind of your doings from the back window. You knew you were in for it because she used your full name, but the spanking you got for ruining your socks was almost worth it, because at the end of the day, you knew something that you hadn't before._

_The science fair was your favorite activity at school. It was your chance to show your teachers that you knew your stuff, that their lectures hadn't fallen on deaf ears. It was your opportunity to be the best in show, and that was what you wanted more than anything else-to be the best and know it. For the rest of the world to know it, too. The As on your report card were all well and good, but you didn't believe you'd really earned them until they were posted on the refrigerator for the family to see._

_Your teachers admired your competitive drive and encouraged your pursuits. Not like home, where your mother viewed the independence of her only daughter with wary suspicion and did her best to remind you that you were different from your three older brothers, and as such, there was a different path for you. She filled your closets with frilly dresses and dainty shoes, and on church days, she thrust gloves onto your hands and a hat onto your head and paraded you to church like an awkward swan amid your gangly, bullish brothers. She pierced your ears before you had teeth, and from the time you could sit in a high chair, she was reading you books on how to be a lady. She showered you with dolls, and Christmases and birthdays were filled with perfumes and lip gloss. The day she took you shopping for your first bra was an ecstasy of maternal joy._

_She tried to teach you cooking and sewing, and you tried so hard to please her. She was your mama, and you loved her, and you would have moved heaven and earth to see her smile at you. But the intricacies of the needle held no charms for you. How could they when you could see and hear your father and brothers playing football in the yard? Football was everything sewing was not-vital and frenetic and unpredictable-and you loved the impact of body on body and the gritty itch of dirt on your face._

_It broke your mother's heart to see you roughhousing with the boys and flouting all the social delicacies she'd tried to impress upon you. Sometimes, you'd catch a glimpse of her pinched face through the kitchen window as you ran past with the ball tucked beneath your arm, and the guilt would come, sudden and piercing as an icepick, but it was never enough to make you stop. In fact, it only added to the thrill. You'd apologize as you ambled into the house with grass stains on your knees and drying blood on your upper lip, and you told yourself you meant it, but a smile always tugged on the corners of your mouth._

_If you disappointed your mother, then you were the apple of your father's eye. He called you Little Bit, and when you were a baby, he carried you everywhere he went in the crook of his massive arm. To this day, the smell of warm flannel and the scratch of it against your cheek are two of the most comforting things you've ever known, and sometimes when you find yourself cold and lonely in the shoebox apartment you call home, you pull a flannel nightshirt from your dresser drawer and bury your nose in it to remind you of the safest place in the world._

_Your father never held your sex against you. He took you hunting and fishing and camping right along with your brothers. You can still remember the way he laughed when it was your turn for target practice with his 30.06 and you fell on your ass from the unexpected recoil. It was a huge, guffawing belly laugh, all guts and throat in the quiet of the woods. He doubled over with his hands on his knees and howled until tears streamed down his blotchy face._

Goddamn, Little Bit, _he'd sputtered between wheezing gales of laughter, and wiped a tear from the end of his nose with the back of his index finger. _Oh, oh, Jesus.

_It occurred to you that your father had taken the Lord's name in vain, and that was scandalous to your ten-year-old, Methodist heart, but of more immediate importance was the burning shame that settled in your cheeks and nape like the onset of fever. You were sitting on your ass in a pile of wet leaves, and your father was laughing at you while brothers smirked._

_You opened your mouth to say something, to apologize, maybe, though God only knew how you were going to talk with that pebble lodged in your throat and the crushing weight of mortification on your chest. And then your father took off his sweat-stained hunting cap, scratched behind one ear, and said, _That was the damndest thing I ever saw, Little Bit.

_You blinked at him in astonishment. There was such pride in his voice, as though you'd just roped a bronco instead of flopping gracelessly onto your ass in the wake of a shotgun blast. You offered him a tentative smile, and then he was grasping you beneath the armpits with his big, bear-paw hands and setting you gently on your feet again._

_He clapped you on the back and smiled at you with teeth stained yellow from years of pipe tobacco. _You want to try again, Little Bit? _he asked._

_You squared your shoulders and nodded vigorously. Of course you wanted to try again. You were always up for a challenge, and besides, you were determined to prove to your brothers that you weren't a weak, sissy girl._

That's my girl, _your father said approvingly, and ruffled your hair. _No quit in you, is there?

_He bent, picked up the rifle, and handed it to you. _There you go, Little Bit. Just take your time and remember what I showed you.

_You remembered, all right. It just didn't seem to do any good. You'd take aim, adjust for recoil, and brace for the inevitable, painful wallop of kickback, but the end result was always the same. The measured squeeze of the trigger was always followed by your uncoordinated exit stage left, legs akimbo. You tried a second time, and then a third, and even your patient father was ready to concede defeat, but you couldn't let it go. To stop, even temporarily, meant that you were admitting that you weren't better than your challenger, and you couldn't abide that. You couldn't, and you still can't. Not even when you should._

_So you kept right on firing, never mind that your shoulder felt loose and shattered in its socket. You fired until the air reeked of cordite and your eyes smarted with gunpowder. But damned if you didn't manage to stand your ground. Sure, your shot was low and off-center, but you kept your feet, and that was good enough for government work. You went home tired and happy, and your father caught holy hell from your mama when you got home. You couldn't move your right arm for a week, but you had the satisfaction of knowing you could fire a 30.06 on your feet._

_Your father thought everything you did was the damndest thing he ever saw, and he was the one who supported your dreams when your mama wanted to crush them flat in the name of saving your soul from the road to perdition. When you announced that you wanted to go to college-a real one, not the local juco, with its squat, stucco bunkers masquerading as classrooms-your father was tickled pink, and on the day you graduated from high school, he presented you with two things: An 18-carat gold crucifix and a University of Washington sweatshirt._

Ain't that the damndest thing you ever saw, Little Bit? _he said, laughing, and lifted you off your feet to twirl you around. Your brothers crowded around for hugs and congratulations. Your mother sat stiffly in her folding chair and scowled at the cotton-and-polyester evidence of your fall from grace._

_It was your father who had helped you fill out the applications to the various schools and apply for various grants and scholarships. He'd come in from the mailbox with his hands full of envelopes, and then he'd sit down at the kitchen table and sort through the pile. He mourned with you over each rejection and celebrated every acceptance letter, and he steadfastly ignored your mother's staunch disapproval as she washed the supper dishes in the sink behind him._

_Your father was your most unflagging advocate, and you suspect it cost him dearly with your mother near the end of your days at home. He refereed the fight between you and your mama about college, and the one about where you would go. And the last one you ever had with your mother, of course, the one about you taking the job here in New York._

_You knew she would object, but you didn't expect the vehemence, the shrill, hectoring desperation of her protest. You had moved away from home before, to Washington, and though she had sniffed and squawked and sidled behind her counter like a disgruntled hen at your gumption, she never got hysterical. It was just hurt, plain and simple, the last-gasp wail of a woman forced to realize that her baby was all grown up._

_But when you mentioned New York, it was as if you'd suggested a day-trip to Sodom and Gomorrah with a stopover in Babylon. She set down a plate hard enough to make it wobble and bobble on the countertop._

You will not be moving to New York, Lindsay Monroe, _she declared, as if she could stop you._

_The argument only deteriorated from there, voices hard and sharp with anger. Old accusations and wounds were resurrected and opened anew with teeth and tongue, and before the dust settled, plates and hearts had been broken with teeth and wagging tongues. Family ties were irrevocably severed that night, and your father sat in the middle with his head in his hands._

_He tried to smooth it over a few days later, came to the door of your house with hat in hand to apologize for your mama, but there was nothing to say. He came to see you off to New York that weekend, all smiles and hearty thumps on the hood of the station wagon as you drove away with your life inside cardboard boxes. He was so small in the rearview mirror as you drove away that you got a lump in your throat. Your father was doing what your mother couldn't: he was letting you go, and as excited as you were to finally be chasing the sun you'd always dreamed of touching as a little girl, the leaving hurt like hell._

_You've tried now and then to call your folks, but each time your mother picks up the phone and realizes who's on the other end, the chill descends like December hard-frost, thick and endless, and the long, conciliatory conversation you'd planned to have gutters and dies in your throat and leaves a sour aftertaste in the back of your throat that reminds you of the smog you can sometimes taste on the air on still summer mornings. It never stops you from asking for your father, though, and she always gives you the same answer. _He's out in the field, _she always says, even when it's late at night, and you know she's lying because your father's routine hasn't changed since they day you were born. But fighting about it is pointless and takes more energy than you've got anymore, so you tell her you understand and that you love her, and you're never surprised when the only response to that is the click of the receiver and the hum of dead line in your ear. The home fires don't burn for you._

_New York is a cesspool, Lindsay, full of degenerates, harlots, and thieves, and if you go there, you'll live to regret it. _That was the last thing her mother had said to her during that fateful argument that had ensured she could never go home again. She had cast it at her like an accusatory stone, screamed it like a proclamation from on High. She'd laughed at her mother at the time, called her old-fashioned and superstitious and controlling. She'd dismissed it as the raving of a deposed tyrant, but now, almost a year later, she wondered if it hadn't been prophecy. Or a curse.

Nothing had gone right since she'd been here. The woman she'd been hired to replace had been murdered by a slimy bastard who had gotten away. The guy on whom she'd had designs had suffered the traumatic, de facto loss of his older brother at the hands of another loser. Another colleague had shot her psychotic boyfriend in self-defense and had spent the last few months lashing out at the world with bared teeth and flashing eyes and was walking with invisible hand grenades strapped to the soles of her feet. Now the All-American guy who represented all that was good and so wonderfully brash about the city was lying, broken, on a bed in a citadel for the dying.

If she were perfectly honest with herself-and now that she thought about it, nowhere were people more honest than in the face of Death's grinning possibility-things had been going wrong since long before Aiden Burn turned up a pile of ash and bone in the backseat of a stolen car. She'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Mac at the Central Park Zoo, and it hadn't gotten any better since. It had, to put it bluntly, been a clusterfuck.

She had thought at first that New York would be the perfect place for her, the one place in the world where she could fit in. It was, after all, the vaunted melting pot, the city where camera-blinded supermodels coexisted with Hasidic Jews and Taoist monks. On one block, you could buy fresh ginseng, and on the next, you could walk away with Albanian sausage still in its casing. There were synagogues and mosques, Methodist churches and Roman Catholic cathedrals, organic markets and delis that reeked of beef blood and pork fat. Life was carried on in haphazard order among the city's boroughs. It was a gaudy patchwork quilt whose squares sometimes blended seamlessly, one into the other, but that all too often displayed their seams with cocksure pride. _Here, _she'd thought as she'd driven into the city for first time with her head out the driver's side window and the spring wind in her hair. _Here is where I can find my place._

_But it didn't work out that way, did it?_ Aunt Ida commiserated. _It never does. Instead, it was just like in Montana, but in reverse. You were still the odd duck, the duckling in a lake full of swans, but now you're weren't smart _enough_. There was always something you'd missed, an aspect of the city not covered in the tourist manuals you'd read. The others were born and bred in the city or had lived here long enough to call her their own, and they knew its quirks intimately, but you were a babe in an unfamiliar wood of concrete and brick._

_Sometimes Flack and Stella would be talking in the break room, and it was like listening to a foreign language fashioned from English syllables, a code not meant for your ears. They referred to sections of the city or even certain blocks by names you had never heard and still can't say fluently. Their jargon was littered with dialectical phrases and case numbers opened and closed long before you dreamed of the bright lights of Times Square._

_It wasn't intentional, their exclusion, and they would gladly explain if you asked. Flack always smirked when it was his turn, and if he was sitting, he would thread his hands behind his head, stretch his long, lean frame in the chair, and tell you a story liberally spiced with asides and tangents and laughter. If he was walking, he would quicken his pace to keep up with the story and write the narrative on the air with his gesticulating hands. Underneath his modern clothes, he was the old Irish beatcop of yore, equal parts mischief and hard-bitten cynicism._

_Stella was just as animated when she told stories, but she drew in rather than spreading out over the room like Flack. She propped her elbows on the table and wrapped both hands around her coffee cup, leaned in as though she was telling you important secrets. She was always so put together, so cool, and though you prided yourself on your sense of style, you felt dowdy and plain next to her. If Flack was the gruff amiability of the city, then Stella was its chic heart, a blend of Fifth Avenue sass and Bronx toughness._

They tried to include you, but no matter how many stories they told over coffee and hot dogs, you would never be one of them. You would always be the new girl, the one who had taken Aiden's place under unhappy circumstances. Shared experiences had bonded them irrevocably, and you were an interloper. If they ever started to forget, there would always be a reminder. Danny Messer, for instance, was only too happy to remind you that you were not one of them and never would be. He's called you Montana since your first day on the job, and you never fail to note the hint of mockery in it. Montana. Outsider. Loser new kid who had no right to be here.

_The distance between you should have closed by now, the wound left by Aiden's absence grafted by new skin, but it's only gotten wider. It became unbridgeable the day Hawkes shambled into Mac's office to tell him that Aiden was dead. You knew it by the way they all looked at you as they gathered around the plasma screen in the AV lab to gaze into the digitized face of irrefutable proof. Sidelong, wary, and damning. You were no longer just a replacement for an absent friend. Now you had stolen the honor of the dead._

_You can pinpoint in your memory the exact moment you lost them all. For Mac, it was the day you overstepped your boundaries and nosed into his life outside the labs. Looking back on it, you realize how reckless and thoughtless it was to assume that Mac would welcome the intrusion of the professional into the private, but back then, you were fixated by the possibility of one-upping Messer and wiping that smug grin off his cocky damn face. It consumed you. You don't look before you leap, and the landings are often rough._

_You'll never forget the expression on Mac's face when he caught sight of you in that smoky club. The music had made his face peaceful, but it hardened when he saw you. He did not return your bright smile, nor did he acknowledge your wave. You knew then that had made a dreadful misstep. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, yes. It is also too late. You lost your favored pupil status that night, and you've never been close to getting it back. And deep in your heart, you suspect you never will._

_You lost Stella the day your predecessor came home to the lab in the backseat of a burned-out car. There was a time and a place to ask the questions you did of her, but you did not know them, and the same selfishness that inspired you to leave Montana over the protests of your mama and the sad resignation of your father reared its ugly head as Stella squatted beside the rear passenger seat and scraped what was left of her friend into evidence baggies with a dental pick._

_I didn't-, _she protested feebly.

_You were always a selfish girl, Lindsay, _her aunt insisted gently. _You didn't mean to be, but you were the only girl and the apple of your father's eye, and you learned early that he could deny you nothing if you looked winsome enough. And school was no different. Success came easily to you, so you began to expect it as your right. When things don't go your way, you have a nasty habit of getting sulky and throwing a tantrum. You evaluate everything in terms of what it means to you, and only then do you consider what it means for others._

_So don't you stand there and tell me you didn't know what you were doing when you hunkered down on your haunches beside that car and asked Stella what Aiden had meant to Danny, a junior high-schooler fishing for dirt on her schoolyard crush. You damn well did know. You just didn't care enough to stop._

_Stella knew, too, and you wonder now how she could have been so composed in the face of such an insult. Her answer was moderate, discreet, and professional, and her voice was mild. Her posture stiffened, but her pick never faltered. She spared you a single, sidelong look as she worked, and you realized instantly that you were dismissed. Her eyes were cold and hard, shutters slammed against isinglass windows. You were chagrined, but you were also ashamed because the regret wasn't for what you had done, but for the fact that there would be no more Stella stories in the break room. And you were right._

_You lost Hawkes that same day. Word travels fast in the contained environment of the labs, and Stella had no doubt vented her spleen to the mild-mannered doctor who faded so easily into the bland, steel and plastic background of the building. Hawkes had always been friendly, not long removed from his own stint as the newbie in the field, but that afternoon in the locker room the smile was gone, placed by an aloof wave and a murmured apology that he couldn't stay to chat. You can't remember when he last had time._

_You nearly lost Flack this morning when Lessing blew that apartment to Kingdom Come in the name of preserving national security. The blast was so fierce that it blew you out of your shoes, and so deafening that you spent the rest of the investigation deciphering the insectile buzz that replaced human speech. For a few heartbeats after the roar of collapsing masonry, you were sure that you were back in the Montana woods with your father, and that the 30.06 had misfired and shattered into a thousand pieces. Then you tasted dust and blood on your lips and remembered where you were._

_You were looking for your shoes when Messer ran up to ask if you were okay, and you could only blink stupidly at him and squint through the grit at his moving lips. And damned if your narcissism didn't strike again, because your only thought was, _Messer is worried about me. _It didn't occur to you what the explosion meant for the others until the paramedics rolled Flack out on a stretcher. Then you saw Stella momentarily come apart at the knees, and who knows how far she might have gone had Mac not emerged from the rubble with blood on his face and fire in his eyes? She sewed her guts back in for him and followed his charge. They all did, and they left you in the dust._

_You never lost Messer, but that's because you never had him. He wrote you off before you ever set foot in the labs. You were the hotshot Montana prodigy who had replaced his partner, and that was all he needed to know. He avoided you when he could and ignored you when he couldn't, and when he could do neither, he laced every word with barely-concealed sarcasm, each designed as a stinging rejection._

_That's why you're out here now in this parking lot. It's your last chance to show him that you're more than just a stuffy country bumpkin from Montana. You're not Aiden Burn, and you never can be, but you are Lindsay Monroe, and that's worth something, more than he thinks, anyway. You can't patch Flack, and even if you could, they wouldn't let you because you're not one of them. They made that abundantly clear when you showed up and they were all huddled around the wall to his room. They made room for Danny, an unconscious, amoebic parting of bodies, but they made no room for you. They simply re-knit themselves into that single and singular entity known as the Watcher._

So there you were, a square peg who not only failed to fit into the round hole, but who couldn't even fucking find it. So you looked over Hawkes' shoulder at the broken piece of the city's heart, and you wondered just what you were supposed to feel. Then Danny cracked and fled, and you followed him. If you couldn't fix Flack, then maybe you could keep Danny from falling off the edge of the world.

She wasn't so sure of that now. Danny was crouching on the asphalt and staring fixedly at the ground between his feet, as if he couldn't quite bring it into focus. One hand rubbed his nape, and the other was balled into a fist against his thigh. She opened her mouth to say something reassuring, then closed it with a snap. Suddenly, all her platitudes seemed limp and empty. She was tempted to squat herself, but she was afraid that if she did, she would simply sink to the ground and stay there until Mac or Stella or Hawkes found them in the morning, sprawled on the blacktop like exhausted children. So she flexed her toes inside her shoes and willed herself to keep standing.

Danny Messer was broken, all sharp angles and severe, narrow lines. The day had compressed him, spread him too thinly over his own bones, and she didn't know what to do. She'd read books on how to stitch wounds with catgut and stop hemorrhaging by applying pressure, but nothing had prepared her for this. There was no one right answer to make this all go away, and she felt dumb and lonely, naked and impotent in front of watching eyes she couldn't see. She wanted to touch him, to offer what meager comfort she could with a hug or an awkward pat on the back, but she was afraid he would cut her to ribbons.

_This isn't right, _her analytical mind insisted, and it wasn't.

If the narrator of her life had told her that one day she would see Danny Messer stripped of his carefully crafted armor of smartass and bravado, she would have laughed in their face. Danny _was _his ego, all mouth and attitude, and his image was precious. He was everything that was dangerous and enticing about New York, switchblades and cigarettes and bourbon on the tongue. He was everything her mother had railed against back at home and everything her body said she needed.

Sometimes when the lab was slow, she daydreamed about seeing behind the tough-guy façade he projected, but this was far different. In her fantasies, the vulnerability had been clean and soft, a softening of the eyes and lips, and she had rewarded his display of confidence by offering up the perfect turn of phrase, the mot juste that proved her cleverness and devotion. In the sweetest of them, his kiss tasted like nicotine and cinnamon gum, smoke and underground fire.

There was nothing soft about this. It was hard and ugly and infected beneath the surface. There was no movie moment, no epiphanous instant of healing. She would not be his savior, now or ever, and if there was a kiss, it would be bitter and dry-tongued and desperate as a last breath before dying, a last-ditch effort to pass down inarticulate knowledge from mouth to mouth. It would taste like sorrow.

"Danny?" Cautious and tentative.

He did not acknowledge her. He did not even blink. He simply hunkered on the blacktop, a golem that did not recognize the name it was to take. He had turned inward in an effort to escape the reality left behind in the rooms of Trinity Hospital.

_Realities, _her ever-pedantic mind corrected automatically. _Remember, until a few months ago, his brother was on that same ward with his eyes taped shut and a ventilator down his throat. He's at the rehab hospital now, but being back here so soon must be a hideous déjà vu, the kind of Groundhog Day that would make Bill Murray eat a 30.06 with a smile._

_Is that what he's thinking about? _she thought as she watched him stare at the blacktop that had so inexplicably become a mirror. _Or is it something else?_

_Do you really want to know? _asked Aunt Ida. _Everybody's got their secrets and their sorrows. Even you. Sometimes you sit by the window of your apartment and look at the lights across the street, and unpleasant memories flutter in the back of your mind like ash-winged moths. You've tried to crush them to dust between your fingers, but they always get loose._

_Like the one about why you left Montana in the first place. That one most of all._

_You got called to the scene one Sunday morning in September. Sheriff Caldwell and Deputy Holmes were already there, leaning against their squad car behind a line of police tape that swayed in the breeze. Caldwell was drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup gripped in one beefy hand, and Holmes was scrubbing his forehead with the back of one hand. You knew it was going to be bad when you saw his face, pale as whey beneath the wide, concealing brim of his hat._

_You weren't reassured when Caldwell hitched up his pants and grunted, _Gonna be a bad one as you passed with field kit in hand. _He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. _Aw, shit, _he muttered, and trudged from the crime scene to pour his coffee into the dirt like a sacrificial offering._

_He was right. It was bad. The family had been dead only a few hours, so the smell of decomp and the flies it invariably attracted had yet to make an appearance, but the meaty, coppery tang of blood hung in the air, rich and cloying, and you put your gloved hand to your nose to smother the reek. Your partner, Robbie Cordero, did the same, for all the good it did. You still smelled it through the latex and powder, and it clung to your clothes long after you left the scene. Later that night, you burned them in the furnace and said a prayer for the first time since you left for college._

_It didn't take long to put together what had happened. The occupant of the house, one Mr. Desmond, waited until his wife left for Sunday services at the Baptist church. When she was gone, he fixed breakfast for his two children and coffee for himself. Then, while they were eating Lucky Charms and cinnamon toast, he went into the bedroom, took his hunting rifle from the closet, and shot them in the back of the head at point-blank range. Cordero found clots of brain tissue in the cereal and the jar of Smuckers Jelly. After his children were dead, he went into the living room, sat down in his easy chair, smoked a Lucky Strike, and then smoked the end of his gun._

_Mrs. Desmond came home while you were scraping samples of her husband's brain from the back of his chair. Caldwell and Holmes were supposed to secure the perimeter, but Caldwell was fifteen years past his prime, and Holmes was sweet, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. She came into the living room, eyes huge and disbelieving inside her bleached face. She was still in her church dress, and the ankle-length hem soaked up blood like a sponge, purity corrupted in the blink of an eye._

What's going on here? _she demanded, as if it were all a prank that could be cleaned up with a bit of elbow grease._

_You spun around, startled. _Ma'am, you can't be in here. _The specimen cup with her husband's brain fragment in it was in your hand, and you dimly realized you were holding it out like a grisly hors d'oevre. _

_Her eyes flicked from your face to your hand and then to the chair behind you, and you watched her eyes go blank with comprehension. She staggered drunkenly, and then her hands came up to clutch her face. Her purse dangled from one bony wrist. Her mouth opened wider and wider; impossibly wide. It made your eyes hurt to look at the endless expanse of tongue and gum and teeth like jutting bones._

She's The Scream, _you thought in dumb, dull amazement. _She's climbed out of the painting and is standing in the middle of the Desmonds' living room. Up close and personal.

_She had sunk to her knees and begun to scream by the time Caldwell and Holmes blundered onto the scene like winded steer to haul her away. The image of her standing in the doorway with her hands clapped to either side of her face and her mouth open in a bottomless gape stayed with you as you were gathering your equipment. Hell, Lindsay, girl, it's still with you now. If you closed your eyes, you'd see it as clearly as you did then._

_It was all you _could _see while you were offering condolences to Mrs. Desmond, crouching beside her while she sat in the patrol car with a blanket over her knees. Shock had aged her, made her skin brittle and translucent, and though you knew it was nerves or trick of the light, you could swear she was still screaming._

_You put in for a transfer that afternoon because you were damned if you were ever going to look at that face again. Bozeman wasn't tiny, but it was small enough to guarantee that your paths would cross again. Maybe at the grocery store or in line at the utility company. You'd see her getting on with what was left of her life. Maybe she'd do well, find love again and make peace with the fact that her children were gone, or maybe grief would crush her beneath its sinking weight and etch lines and grooves into her face. Maybe she'd succumb to booze or pills or mindless fucking at the truckstop to keep the ghosts at bay. But however she turned out, it didn't matter, because you knew you'd only see her one way: as a living scream with both hands clapped to her face in a tableau of immortal horror._

_You'd planned to go to Washington-Seattle, maybe, or Tacoma. You knew the area from your college days, and the weather was beautiful in the summer and fall. But Washington was booked solid, and then you got wind of the opening in New York. New York was glamour and excitement and exotic cases, and so you put in. _

_You never expected to get the nod, but you figured it never hurt to try. You assumed it would go to somebody home-grown, trained at Columbia or NYU. So when you got the letter asking for a preliminary interview, you read it three times before its meaning sank in, and then you did a giddy, fist-pumping jig in front of your mailbox. Two interviews and a psych eval later, you had your one-way ticket to Wonderland._

_It's times like now that you wonder why you ever stepped through the looking glass._

She was jolted from her reverie by a sudden, "Fuck!" from Danny, who smashed his fist into the asphalt.

"Fuck!" he shouted again. "Fuck! Fuck!"

"Danny!" she said sharply. "Danny, stop! Stop it!"

But he didn't stop. He didn't hear her, of course. He was too far gone into a sorrow in which she had no part. She walked to him on legs that had gone wooden and squatted in front of him. His fist struck the blacktop again, and this close, she could see dark smears of blood on his knuckles.

_He's bloodletting, _she thought, and grabbed his wrist. "Danny, stop. Danny, it's okay."

When he looked at her, she froze, heart lodged in her throat. His eyes were perfect blanks behind his glasses.

_It's Mrs. Desmond, _she thought. _She's followed me here to the land of Topsy-Turvy._

Then he jerked roughly away from her, and the illusion was gone. "The fuck it is," he snapped, and she grimaced.

_Smooth, Monroe, _she chided herself. _So much for the fantasy of always knowing what to say._

"We should take you back inside, get that looked at," she ventured after a moment.

He shook his head. "Naw, I'm good. I'm fine." He flexed and closed his hand a few times to show her just how fine he was. "See? No big deal."

"Still, I think we should-,"

He cut her off. "I said no, all right? I'm not goin' back in there. It's not happenin'.

She knew better than to fight. Even dazed and wounded, Danny Messer was a stubborn bastard. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Fine," she conceded. "Then let me drive you home."

"I'm supposed to be drivin' you home, remember?"

"Yeah, well, plans have changed. You're in no shape to drive." She held out her hand for his car keys.

"Why?" he said defensively. "I'm not drunk."

"Danny," she repeated stubbornly, and advanced on him.

He fumbled inside his pockets for the car keys and dropped them into her upturned palm. "There. Happy now?" he asked.

"No," she answered dully, and trudged to the driver's side of the car. "I'm not."

There wasn't much to say after that. She drove him home in silence. Every now and then he would talk, mostly to tell her that it wasn't Flack in the bed back there. It couldn't be, dammit. It was desperate and pleading and heartbreaking, and it was bullshit. Not that it mattered. The truth was irrelevant at a time like this, and nine times out of ten, it only made things worse.

Still, the pragmatist in her couldn't let it lie. "Danny," she said carefully.

"Don't, Montana. Just don't. It ain't Flack back there."

_Montana. _Final, irrefutable proof that she was not one of them. For a brief moment after the explosion, differences had been forgotten. He had clutched her hands and called her Lindsay, and concern had been stamped on his face. Now it wasn't even _Monroe_ anymore, and he had drawn away from her as much as he could, huddled against the passenger door with his face buried in the crook of his arm.

She let him persist in his delusion and bit the inside of her cheek to quash the urge to weep. It was ridiculous to be feeling sorry for herself when Flack was fighting for his life at Trinity, but the more she tried to rationalize the hurt away, the deeper it went, and so she did what she had always done when disappointment grew too bitter. She told herself that she was stronger and pretended that it was true.

She dropped Danny off at his apartment, and she was relieved when he refused her offer of company. She didn't think she could stand sitting awkwardly on his couch while both of them pretended that everything was fine, and that it was a meeting of good friends in a moment of crisis. The truth would tell. It would be in Danny's eyes, opaque as whitewashed mirrors, and in hers, dull with indisputable knowledge.

She left him standing in front of his building, and when she looked back a moment later, he was gone. She faced forward again and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and imagined her arms reaching heavenward to stroke the gravid belly of the moon. Up, up, up, into the firmament and past the cold points of the stars. She wasn't Lindsay anymore; she was Little Bit, and she could do the damndest things. Her Daddy had told her so. If she thought hard enough, she could fly away to the land where everything made sense and she knew where she belonged.

"I'll fly away," she sang fervently under her breath. "Oh, I'll fly away."

But when she opened her eyes, her feet were still firmly on the ground. The burden of adulthood had made her too heavy to fly, had crushed her delicate wings beneath its weight. Sometimes, she realized, knowledge was a dangerous thing.

"I'll fly away," she whispered sadly. But she didn't. She just trudged to the subway station with her arms wrapped around herself for comfort.


	4. Depression

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

The last time Sheldon Hawkes could remember being this tired, he had been a trauma surgeon in a Harlem E.R., elbow-deep in somebody else's mistakes. He'd clamped severed arteries and dug bullets from the abdominal and chest cavities of children not old enough to know better who now never would be. He'd reconstructed smashed occipital bones from accident victims and shuffled into the waiting room with blood on his gloved hands to tell terrified relatives that all the medical magic in the world hadn't been enough, so sorry. It was, he supposed, the weariness of Sisyphus.

It was why he'd left surgery for the cool, sterile cloister of the morgue. The noble intentions that had carried him through college and med school and a grueling, four-year internship had evaporated in the harsh reality of the emergency room and the blood that never stopped dripping from broken bodies onto his scrub-covered shoes. How could he hope to sustain it when evidence of futility rolled through the hospital doors daily in twos and fours and sixes? He'd worked miracles in the operating room only to see those miracles laid low by knifings and TEC-9s a week later.

So, he'd quit. When it had happened, it had felt like a snap decision, a bolt from the blue, but when he considered it later, he'd realized that it had been a long time coming, a steady erosion of hope that had made him not just bone-tired, but soul-tired.

_Maybe the ending was seeded in the very beginning, the very first time you scrubbed in and unraveled another human being with your scalpel. It had all seemed so clean when you were dealing with possibilities, when the closest you got to disease and trauma was in the slides and videos of illnesses and their corrective procedures. Safe in the tidy halls of Princeton, malignant tumors and bone grafts held a perverse beauty. Science, your lofty professors, assured you, had tamed most of Death's most fearsome guises, and the rest were but a grant and a breakthrough away. And why shouldn't you believe them? These men had pioneered revolutionary procedures that stalled the obliterating menace of Alzheimer's and stole time for those dying from emphysema or COPD. In your lifetime, these white knights of modern medicine had eradicated smallpox and polio, and goiter was all but forgotten in the United States thanks to the surreptitious inclusion of iodine in table salt. Of course you'd conquer the world on the end of a syringe._

_But the emergency room was a rude awakening to all your carefully nurtured presumptions about the reach and power of the profession you had chosen with such confidence. Medicine was messy and ugly and inexact, and there was nothing pretty about a malignant tumor perched atop someone's colon in wet, triumphant malevolence or skull fragments embedded in a sixteen-year-old girl's brain by her own windshield. Death was unconquerable, and only the most arrogant ass would believe otherwise. _

_Those differentials and diagnoses that were so clear-cut on the classroom blackboard got a whole hell of a lot more complex when you were standing underneath the hot lights of the operating room with somebody's whole world laid open on your table. You were a good doctor and an excellent surgeon. You knew it, and the hanks of lambskin on your apartment wall attested to it, but that didn't make for much comfort when the moment arrived and you sank your steel into unprotected, yielding flesh. If you made a mistake at Princeton, you got a lousy grade and heaping helping of condescension from the snooty prick who ran the class, but you also got another run at the bull, an opportunity to right the wrong._

_But there were no second chances in the real world. If you were wrong or careless under the lights, people died. You were always acutely aware of that fact as you worked. It was your constant companion every time you gloved up, settled on your nape and in the small of your back with sharp, pearl-tipped claws. It reminded you of the wager you were taking with other people's lives. You were betting that you were smarter and that your hands were faster than God's, and it chided you for your hubris and whispered in your ear of those who would be left behind if you were wrong._

_You have a host of them now. You've carried them with you for all these years, the faces of the people who you weren't fast enough or smart enough to save. Your professors at med school tried to prepare you for the eventuality that one day, God would be faster. They stood at the front of grand lecture halls in their pristine, white labcoats and cited the law of averages and statistics as if it were a comfort to know that only God never lost a roll of the dice._

_But the law of averages was no comfort when you were gazing into the tear-stained face of a mother, grandmother, or wife and telling them that there was no hope, that their loved one had drifted beyond your reach despite all your frantic efforts. Losing was dirty and sorry, and more than once, you stood over a body, up to your elbows in blood and tissue, swearing between your teeth that you weren't losing this one. Sometimes you made good on your boast, but more often than not, you wound up in the doctors' locker room, peeling off bloody gloves and washing failure from your hands like Pilate._

_It was Hannah Mitchum that drove you out of the emergency room and into the withered, barren womb of the autopsy room. She wasn't one of your patients, God forbid. In fact, it wouldn't surprise you in the least to learn that she was still out there on the streets of Harlem, bulling her way through the grey, wretched unfairness of the world with grim, jowly determination. She'd be older now, of course, and maybe white would have joined the strands of silver in her hair like Time's blighting kisses, but she would be fundamentally unchanged, obsidian and tempered steel beneath her clothes._

_No, it was her children who were your patients-all three of them. You saw the first, Robert, in March 1999, strapped to a gurney with his brain peeking through his shattered skull like a timid mushroom. He'd been hit by a drunk driver as he was crossing the street. The impact had knocked him out of his beloved Air Jordans and thrown him thirty feet to the opposite curb. The driver was so hammered that he never even slowed, and he would later testify that he remembered nothing of the incident._

_You don't, either, but you _do _remember the aftermath with hellish clarity. You remember that you were flirting with the day nurse on the E.R. before you started your post-op rounds. You were surreptitiously admiring the delicate, swan curve of her neck as you regaled her with the musical virtues of Miles Davis. You were moving in for the kill when the doors slid open and EMTs rushed Robert Mitchum, 22, inside. _

_You knew he was gone the moment you got a good look at him and saw his brain pulsing through the hole where skull had been. Skull fragments and spinal fluid stippled the sheets around his head, and the blood, red and pungent and terribly final against the white of the gurney pillow. You still remember the grizzled, old beat cop who trailed after the gurney with the kid's bloody shoes dangling from one hand like a talismanic fetish. He took them to the precinct, but not before you'd claimed them for your own in your mental menagerie, and later that night, long after Robert Mitchum went to his winding sheet on a coroner's slab, you saw them in your weary mind's eye, brilliant and vivid on the ends of the cop's grey fingers._

_You cleaned up what you could in the operating room, but there was no sense of urgency to the procedure. Whoever Robert Mitchum had been was long gone, left on the asphalt of the unforgiving street. He might go on breathing; the human brain surrendered life grudgingly even under the direst of conditions, but he would never remember who he was breathing for. He was that rarest and saddest of breeds: The human vegetable._

_It was a pragmatic thought supported by your years of medical training, but it was impossible to sustain in the face of Hannah Mitchum. She was waiting in the hallway when you emerged from the operating room, a squat, stolid woman dwarfed by the yawning narrowness of the corridor. Inevitability stretches things, have you noticed that? The hallway never seemed as long when you were delivering good news as it did when it was bad. Awareness of death is hard and fast, ruthless as a punch to the chest, but the instant before is endless, taffy pulled in the hands of a malicious child-god. _

_She had to have known the answer to the question before she asked it. It was in your haggard, bruised face and the heaviness of your crepe-soled step on the linoleum. But she had to ask. They all do. It's an autonomic response, like breathing or sweating, and all of them have the same desperate thought: _Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm misreading the signals, and everything is going to be okay. _But they're not and it isn't, and their misguided hope makes reality even crueler when the hammer comes down._

How's my baby? _she said when she saw you, and she gripped her purse strap like it was the only thing keeping her upright._

_What could you do? You took her by the elbow and led her to a chair and told her the truth. You watched the fragile hope gutter and die and heard it pass from her lips in an anguished death rattle. She fractured beneath the skin and sank into herself, arms folded around her quivering middle._

Oh, no. My baby, my baby, _she moaned, and began to rock back and forth in the chair, as though she thought to soothe her absent child with her mother's telepathy. _

_You offered your sympathies for whatever they were worth and offered to take her to him. She leaned on you the whole way there, frail and faltering on the smooth linoleum, and when she got to his room, she just stood in the doorway and stared at the gauze and the tubes that were holding her son together._

That ain't my baby, _she said softly into the stillness. Faint and disbelieving._

Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid it is, _you answered just as softly, but the words were ground glass and bitter poison in your mouth, and you grimaced._

_She stared as you like you were speaking in tongues, eyes bulging and clouded with tears, and then she tottered into the room. _Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, _she moaned, and clutched the metal bedrails of her son's bed._

_She sank into a chair beside the bed, slipped her hand through the metal rails, and held a hand that would never return her encouraging squeeze. You left her still arguing with God and went to wash her son's blood off your skin._

_She was still sitting there three days later, but the argument with God was finished. She'd finally come to the truth you'd seen the minute you saw her son. The fight was over, and she was exhausted as she sat at his bedside and stroked cold, limp fingers. Her shoulders were slumped, and she looked smaller than she had before, as if grief were eroding her from the bottom up._

Hello, Dr. Hawkes, _she said when you slipped into the room with chart in hand. She did not turn around or stop stroking her son's hand._

_You started to draw up a chair to discuss a prognosis that was unchanged from the one you made three days ago, but she stopped you._

It's time to let him go, isn't it? _she said, and began to cry. _

_You sat in the chair you'd pulled up with a graceless flop, and closed the chart. It was useless paperwork now. _I can't make that decision for you, _you told her._

But he's gone, isn't he? He's been gone a long time. _Now she did look at you, eyes wide and wretched, daring you to give her a single shred of hope._

Yes, ma'am, _you agreed. _Three days.

_A sob escaped her, but she nodded as though that was the answer she'd expected. _Give me an hour, _she said. _Get your paperwork ready, and then you can- _Her mouth worked for a moment. _C'n do what you need to do, _she finished. _I just need…a little more time to say goodbye.

Of course. Take all the time you need, _you replied, and took your leave to pull yourself together and gather the paperwork that reduced the snuffing of a human life to a painless, bloodless business transaction. There was no point in telling her that an hour wouldn't be enough time, that eternity wouldn't suffice to say goodbye. That was a truth the heart knew but would never understand._

_It was two hours before the papers terminating his life support and donating his organs were signed and another hour before the hospital chaplain closed his Bible. You didn't want to be the one to choose the moment when life's tenacious spark was forever extinguished, but the only other person in the room with the authority to make that decision was Hannah Mitchum, and she couldn't do it. She knew what she had to do, but knowing the right thing to do and having the will to carry it out are two different things. She was haunted by the phantom possibility that she was wrong, that despite all evidence to the contrary, her son would open his eyes and see her selling his soul to Charon for the sake of her insurance deductible._

_So it was you who gave the signal, a slow blink of your eyes and a somber inclination of your head. The nurse turned off the ventilator with a brisk press of a button, and stillness settled over the room like dust. Robert Mitchum's chest rose once, twice, and then stopped. Hannah Mitchum's own chest rose and fell, rose and fell, as though she had begun to breathe for her dead son, but then the sobs came, hard and wracking, and she finally let go of her hope and his wasted hand._

_You left her in the well-meaning hands of the grief counselor and went to wash guilt and failure from your skin in the staff showers. You let the water scald you and scrubbed soap into your pores until they were chapped and raw, but you never felt clean, not that night. You bowed your head beneath the pounding spray and prayed that you'd never see Hannah Mitchum again._

_But you did. In August 2000. Her daughter, Jasmine, contracted viral meningitis. Her mother thought it was the flu at first, and by the time she brought her to the E.R., it was too late. You tried anyway, because it wasn't fair that a mother should be asked to make another blood tithe to the universe so soon after the first. You admitted her to the ICU and pumped her full of antivirals, but it was a losing battle. The only mercy was that Hannah Mitchum did not have to decide the hour of her daughter's dying. Jasmine slipped away of her own accord on August 8th at 10:23PM._

_Hannah Mitchum sat beside her daughter's bed and cried in a grim tableau of déjà vu. _I should have come sooner, _she croaked to no one in particular. _I should've known. I was her mother. _It was a title cast like indictment._

There was nothing more you could have done, _you assured her, and to this day, you wonder who you really meant to comfort. You left the room with your doctor's cap crumpled in one hand and went to take a shower, Pontius Pilate once more._

_You saw her for the last time in October 2001. It was her youngest son this time, caught in the crossfire of a robbery gone wrong. He had gone to the store to buy milk and a loaf of bread, and he had stopped at the counter to buy a package of licorice twists. That hesitation landed him in your E.R. with a sucking GSW to the chest. He died before he ever made it to the OR, lungs and shattered ribs exposed to the lights of the trauma room. You pronounced at 7:12 PM, and by 7:20, the orderlies were mopping his blood from the floor._

_You didn't realize who he was until you saw Hannah Mitchum standing by the nurses' station, your albatross come one more time. You froze in the hallway, her son's chart clutched in one hand. She was strangely ephemeral in spite of her size, and you suspected that if you reached out, your fingers would pass through her. You opened your mouth to speak, but nothing would come out because your intended words lacked the requisite will to take form. You knew why and for whom she had come, but you didn't want the confirmation._

_You didn't speak, but she knew anyway. A mother's intuition does not die when her children do. It remains as a constant reminder of what she has lost. She turned her head and saw you standing there, Death's herald in dirty, green scrubs._

Dr. Hawkes, _she said. _Is my son dead? _Weary and matter-of-fact. Her anguish was all used up._

_You still couldn't speak, so you nodded and studied the floor. It broke your heart to see the resignation in her face, as though she had expected you to fail her again. But why shouldn't she? You'd already lost two of her children, and now a third had been claimed under your watch. You wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, make her understand that you had truly done the best you could, but you didn't dare, lest her pointed teeth remind you that it wasn't good enough and never had been. You watched her shuffle to the nearest chair, purse dangling from one slack hand like the weight of her sorrow. You offered your condolences, which, after failing her thrice, tasted more like a curse, and retreated to the chemically-treated absolution of the shower stall._

_You handed in your resignation the next shift. You were tired of watching youth die and the old wither beneath the scorching, hungry fever-heat of cancer, tired of postponing the inevitable, and you didn't want to find out if Hannah Mitchum had a fourth child. The chief of staff accepted the folded piece of paper without a word. He was tired, too, after all, so tired of the death and blood that he had retreated to his office and transformed uncomfortable lives into comfortable statistics. _

_You cleaned out your locker and told yourself that done was done, but you couldn't shake your jones for helping people, so when word got out that the City of New York was looking for a Chief Medical Examiner, you jumped in with both feet. You'd always loved medicine and surgery; it was the losing you couldn't handle. Being a coroner solved that problem because the question of life or death had already been answered and all that was left for you to do was find the why._

_It was peaceful in the morgue, quiet and cool and private. Loved ones who thought nothing of lingering for weeks and months at a relative's beside to await the moment of death had no desire to see what came after. There were no pleading eyes to wonder what more you could have done, just Danny or Mac or Flack telling you to pull back the sheet or slide the body into the drawer again. There was no more unreasonable expectation of a miracle._

_If you could not save them, then you would document the secrets of their demises with fanatical thoroughness. You threw yourself into your new cause with unbridled zeal. You were so smitten with the solemn comfort of the dead in their modern, steel crypt that you created a cozy enclave for yourself in its older stone recesses. A cot and a light to read by were all you needed, and more often that not, you spent the night with the stink of formaldehyde in your nostrils._

_It was your vocation, your calling, and you should have been satisfied. You were-for a while. But you were always ambitious, even as a child. When you should have been enjoying Kick the Can and Tag with your friends in the park, you were impatiently awaiting adolescence, and when that came, you were already looking forward to adulthood and the patch of earth on which you'd stake your claim. You kissed girls and dreamed your dreams, but you don't remember them. They passed in a blur on your way to better things. You have two degrees on your wall from Princeton, but you cannot recall a single detail of that venerable old campus. It was just a waystation of sensible brick, and no more._

_You felt the wayfarer's itch beneath your skin every time the coroner's assistants rolled another body into your morgue. You knew that whoever had made this offering to your slab wasn't your concern, but you were curious all the same. Your work was as meticulous and unimpeachable as ever, but you found yourself constructing the face of the killer in your mind as you noted contusions and abrasions on your anatomical charts. To know how someone had died was no longer sufficient. You wanted to know the whys and wherefores and how longs. You listened intently whenever the field CSIs discussed a case in your hearing, and you quietly began ordering forensics texts from the libraries and the Internet._

_You should have stayed in the morgue, where death was not your fault, but merely your occupation. You know that now, but when Mac granted your application for fieldwork, you were elated. It was another feather in your well-bedecked cap of accomplishment, another challenge to be conquered. You were up two hours before the alarm on your first day of fieldwork, bright-eyed and skittish with anticipation._

_And then it turned out that the vic was not yet dead, and all your long-suppressed instincts resurfaced. You vaulted over the turnstile and sprinted to the gurney being rolled toward the waiting ambulance. Latex met still-warm flesh, tantalizing with the possibility that life might yet be restored, and the monotonous, atonal hum of the cardiac monitor was the refrain of a song you had once known but had since forgotten. You rolled the dice against God one more time, and as usual, you lost._

_You still remember the way Mac looked at you when you stripped off your gloves and tossed them into a trashcan with a snort of disgust. Curious and appraising as he crouched by his kit. _It never gets any easier, _you told him, and went to work like nothing had happened._

_You should have stopped then, told Mac you wanted to go back to the morgue, but you didn't. You were too proud, and you didn't want to admit that you'd opened the Pandora's box God gifts every man at the hour of his birth. So you bulled onward, ever mindful of the fluttering moth at your shoulder. And then, one day, it landed on Aiden._

His fingers closed reflexively at the mention of Aiden's name, and he swore he could feel the thick, soapy cake of clay beneath his fingernails. He'd been thrilled to reconstruct the skull, almost giddy, and though he'd been well aware that the denuded face in his hand had once been a living soul, he'd viewed the task as a game, a puzzle to be assembled or a model to be glued together. He'd sat on his stool and tapped his feet to music only he could hear, had hummed as he drew the shavers and shapers through the moist clay. He could clearly remember humming "Who Are You?" as he molded clay over the cheekbones.

He had lost himself in the task, and the clay had felt wonderful beneath his hands, organic and elastic and inviting. He was a mortal invited to play God again for a few glorious hours, and he had not squandered the opportunity. Indeed, he had been reverent and meticulous, careful to document every curve and jut and facial characteristic. He had fussed and pinched and teased the clay until it was perfect, until the Creator inside him had been satisfied, and then he had rolled his stool back and stood to better appreciate the work of his hands.

He hadn't believed what he was seeing at first, _who_ he was seeing. He'd cocked his head one way and then the other, blinked to clear his vision, but the face he had fashioned had stared lidlessly back at him, stark against the beige background of the workstation. He'd scrubbed his face with hands and smelled clay, clay that had suddenly gone sour and smelled of ash and smoke.

"No," he'd told the room. "Uh uh. No way." He'd even walked to another corner of the room, as though he'd thought a change of perspective would alter the truth, but no matter where in the room he'd stood, the fact remained that Aiden Burn's face-or a reasonable facsimile thereof-was staring back at him. He'd tottered back to his stool and sunk bonelessly onto it, and it was fifteen minutes before he'd trusted his feet to hold him.

He still hadn't wanted to believe, and so he'd gone to DNA and ordered tests done on the dental pulp of the teeth. Jane Parsons had worked quickly and efficiently, and when she handed him the results, he'd stared at them in stunned misery. DNA had removed all doubt. Aiden Burn was dead, and he had replaced the skin of her face with medical grade Play-doh.

It was Mac he'd gone to for reassurance. For once, he had wanted to be told that he was wrong, that he'd made a mistake, and if he had, Mac would give it to him straight. Mac had been in the AV lab when he brought him the paper, and he'd been pathetically relieved when Mac hadn't wanted to accept it, either. It meant he wasn't crazy for wishing. But whether he'd wanted to believe it or not, Mac hadn't told him he was wrong, and he'd understood then that there was no backing out of the truth.

He'd been all right until the lab computer had projected his handiwork onto the plasma projector screen at the head of the AV lab. Aiden's face had loomed over them like a macabre Macy's Day float, and he'd heard all the air leave Danny Messer's body.

_There went whatever chance you had with Messer, Monroe, _he'd thought with grim hysteria, and was disgusted with himself.

Danny had been the one to break the paralyzed silence of the room. He'd whirled abruptly on his heel and fled, jaw clenched and eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. He'd wanted to leave, too; not to follow Danny, but to flee the scene of _his _crime that stared at him from the monitor, complete with Aiden's trademark cocksure smirk. But he couldn't. The eyes held him in thrall.

_This is who I am, Hawkes. Are ya glad you solved the mystery?_

Lindsay had been the next to leave, slipping out while Mac and Stella gazed at the screen with identical expressions of furious disbelief. They were a matched set in their grief, Mac at stiff-necked attention, and Stella jutting her chin in unconscious defiance of the science that had turned so unkindly against its guardians.

He hadn't stayed to find out who would be the next to leave. He'd forced his frozen, numb feet into motion and wandered into the hall, where the air was cooler on his skin. He'd made it to the bathroom, only to find Messer hunched over the sink with his glasses tossed haphazardly on the countertop. He'd looked so different without his glasses on, smaller and more vulnerable, twelve instead of twenty-nine. The water had been running in the sink, but Danny had hardly noticed; he was too busy squinting into the mirror and rubbing irritably at his eyes.

He hadn't known what to do or say, so he'd said nothing and stepped up to the next sink.

"Did you know it was her, Hawkes?" Danny had asked brusquely just as he'd turned the tap. "When you were makin' that face in there, did you know it was her?"

"No, Danny, I didn't," he'd answered with a mouth gone bone-dry, and passed his hands beneath the cold water.

Danny laughed, a harsh, brittle sound that echoed in the bathroom, and shrugged. "Naw. 'Course you didn't. I mean, how could you know? Right, Doc?"

He'd had no idea how to respond, but there had been a whiff of something rotten and dangerous in the question, and he'd thought it best to nod and agree with whatever Danny said. He'd concentrated on scrubbing water into his cuticles.

Danny had turned off the tap and groped for his glasses without bothering to dry his hands. He stabbed them onto his face and ran his damp hands through his hair. "Ain't that a bitch, Doc?" he'd murmured quietly, and patted him on the shoulder. "Ain't that a bitch?" Danny'd left without another word, and he'd scrubbed his hands until his fingers bled and prickled, convinced he could still feel clay underneath his nails.

Danny had been right, though. It _had _been a bitch, and it was a bigger bitch five days later, when he'd stood in front of Aiden's father in a suit he hadn't worn since a medical conference in San Francisco three years before and offered his condolences. Mr. Burn had been old and slumped in his suit, the veins in his face unforgiving, blue lines beneath parchment-paper skin. He'd been surrounded by the family he had left-cousins and sisters and nephews-and he'd stared at the box into which the mortician had poured his only daughter.

_I'm the man who returned your daughter's face, _he'd thought, but his mouth had said, "I'm Dr. Hawkes, and I worked with your daughter. She was a lovely woman, and I'm very sorry for your loss, sir."

Mr. Burn had muttered something incomprehensible and thrust out his hand. It was cold and bony when he shook it, and when he took his hand away, he was sure that he had left smears of clay behind like bits of slipping flesh. He was so repulsed by the illusion that he'd recoiled and curled his hand into a fist. Mr. Burn didn't take offense. In fact, he doubted he'd seen him at all. He had eyes only for his little girl, a Sleeping Beauty forever in her secret bed of wood and lacquer.

He'd wanted to leave, but he'd held his ground until Flack and Danny had hoisted her casket onto their shoulders and carried it down the steps of the church. That was too much, too final, and he'd scuttled away under the pretense of getting some air. He'd found that air in his own living room, and he'd spent the rest of the day listening to Count Basie without hearing him and scrubbing his fingers raw in the kitchen sink.

It was Danny the moth had landed on next, though to be fair, its shadow had fallen over him the same day that Aiden made one last appearance in their lab. Danny was already reeling from the loss of Aiden when Flack got word that Louie Messer was clinging to life in the back of an ambulance screaming towards Trinity, and that was the blow that had broken him. He'd heard the faultline snap as Danny had sprinted past him and out of the precinct, followed gamely by Flack, who had insisted on driving him. Adulthood was an illusion in which Danny had clumsily wrapped himself, and it was brutally, irrevocably gone.

He'd followed Danny to the hospital as soon as his shift was over. Danny had been rooted to his brother's bedside, hands dangling loosely between his knees and glasses off so that he wouldn't have to see the wreck that had been his older brother. The guise of adulthood had been reapplied, but not well. The seams had been clearly visible in the protective hunch of his shoulders and the bleak, lost wariness of his eyes. He had been thirty going on twelve again, just like that day in the bathroom, and he'd wondered stupidly if the glasses Danny wore on his face every day weren't imbued with dark and terrible fairy magic that allowed him to play dress-up in a grown-up's skin.

It had been an absurd thought, a _stupid_ thought, but standing in the doorway of Louie Messer's room and watching Danny shrink with every shrill beep of the cardiac monitor, he hadn't been able to shake it. Besides, he'd told himself, it was no more absurd than believing that the moth from his Pandora's box had escaped and was spreading woe among his colleagues like plague. Not when he could see the outline of its wings reflected in the windowglass.

"I'm sorry, Danny," he'd said.

Danny had looked at him, eyes red and raw and pouched with exhaustion. "For what, Doc?" Grating and hopeless.

_For opening the box. _"I don't know," he'd answered, and it had sounded so hollow and false even to his own ears that he hadn't been surprised when Danny had dismissed him with a grunted admonition to go home and get some sleep. He'd left Danny to his watch and Flack to his and washed his hands in the hall water fountain on the way out.

Stella was next to feel wind from tainted wings. She'd shot Frankie Mala to death in her own apartment and passed out cold while his blood pooled and stiffened to tacky nap on the carpet. He'd never gotten the chance to apologize for that one; Flack had appointed himself the guardian of the way, and no one came unto Stella save by him, and anyway, they'd all been too busy working the evidence and praying that it was a good shoot.

It had been, of course, but the distinction between murder and justifiable homicide had been of little consolation to Stella. She had retreated into herself, cocooned herself in the hard, protective shell of her anger. She had been soft once, guts and feminine curves and vivacious smiles, but now she was hard, guts and hard angles and a lightless smile with too many teeth that reminded him of a leer. The last time he'd heard her laugh, it had sounded like the clittering rattle of bones in the back of her throat, and the skin of his forearms had crawled and puckered into hard knots of gooseflesh.

And now Flack had fallen victim. He wondered if Stella had passed it to him while he was keeping watch over her at Trinity. Maybe she passed dust from the moth's wings to him when he was hugging her, or maybe it had happened when he was helping her with her coat. It was a sly vector, the despair that the moth carried, and neither one of them would have known until it was too late. Until now.

_He reminded you of Hannah Mitchum's youngest son when you first saw him lying in that bed. The wound was a little lower, but just as vicious, just as ugly. You didn't have to talk to his doctor to know he'd missed death by millimeters and a dirty shoelace. As it is, it's still going to be touch-and-go for the next twenty-four hours while you wait to see if infection's going to set in, and Mac did him no favors on that score by photographing his open abdominal wound sans mask._

_You keep waiting for his mother to turn up in the hallway outside his room, wizened and dazed by the concussion of an explosion whose echoes extended farther than anyone imagined. You keep waiting to see her there, desperately clutching the sleeve of Dr. Singh's surgical smock and begging him for answers he cannot possibly give, but she never turns up. You've been back to check three times since you told Mac and Stella you were going to discuss Flack's immediate prognosis with the neurologist on duty, and there is no mother hovering in the hallway like the ghost of uneasy conscience. Just Mac sprawled in a chair outside the room and Stella in a chair inside it, her fingers curled steadfastly around Flack's pale hand._

_There's no real reason for you to be here now. It's three in the morning, and you have to work tomorrow, but you can't bring yourself to leave. If you go home, you'll just sit on your couch or lie on your bed and listen for the flutter of tiny wings against the window. At least here, you can pretend to make a difference, go through the motions with the creaking tendons of muscle memory. You can play doctor, look at scans and charts that are technically none of your business and tell yourself that you'll get it right this time, that you won't lose this roll of the dice._

At least it was something. He was tired of watching his friends fall apart, tired of groping for the familiar angle of a shoulder only to find it sharp and cutting against his palm, twisted steel and shattered glass. He was tired of looking at Stella and seeing shadows and deep hollows; at Danny and seeing the distance in his eyes, of brushing against him and feeling the ragged-edged space where Aiden had been. He was tired of waiting for the next wingbeat and the next tragedy. He wanted to look at Mac or Lindsay or his own pinched reflection in the mirror and not think about which of them was next.

He had been a trauma surgeon once upon a time, and he had been able to wring miracles from shattered bone and pulped tissue, to breath stolen life into dying flesh by dint of his refusal to accept the circumstances set before him. He had fixed the unfixable. So why couldn't he fix his friends?

The thought weighed heavily on his mind as he trudged toward yet another meeting with Flack's neurologist, and along the way, he stopped to wash his hands in a nearby water fountain.

_Just like Pontius, _whispered a voice inside his head, and from behind him came the unmistakable flutter of wings.


	5. Acceptance

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N:** As the protagonist in Stephen King's _Lisey's Story _says: Bool! The end.

Mac Taylor couldn't shake the certainty that he had sand in his shoes. He knew he didn't because he had checked them as he sat in the back of the ambulance at the bombing site, and again in the hospital bathroom just before he'd gone out to talk to Flack's attending physician. No sand, just sock lint and the warm-fabric piquancy of sweaty feet. He'd even rubbed his palm over the soles of his feet to be sure, and it had come away clean.

_Just like your Army days, _grunted a wry voice inside his head. _All that's missing was the white glove, and the way you're going, you might be wearing those again soon, too._

He was a scientist, and he had spent his career following the evidence. His eyes told him there was no sand in his shoes, and so did his sensitive fingertips, and yet, he was still sitting in his chair outside Flack's room, surreptitiously scraping his feet against the scuffed linoleum floor and gritting his teeth against the furtive slither of sand in his shoes.

He'd never liked sand, even as a child growing up in Chicago. The city was, much like New York, a world of concrete and asphalt, and the only grass he could ever remember seeing had been on the field at Wrigley. But every few years, his mother's sister, Imogen, would swoop down and carry him and his mother off for a week at the Jersey shore. He couldn't remember much about Aunt Imogen now, who had died his senior year of high school. Just fleeting glimpses of pink fingernails and even pinker lips and a rubber swim cap festooned with fake flowers. She'd smelled vaguely of lilac and nicotine, and her voice had been husky with the promise of the emphysema that would eventually kill her. What he _did _remember was the sand.

It wasn't the rasping texture of it that bothered him, or the way it burned in his hand when he scooped it up to build sandcastles on the shoreline. It was the sheer, sneaking prevalence of it. It got everywhere-his eyes, his mouth, between his toes-and no matter how long his mother or Aunt Imogen held him under the freezing shower at the end of the rickety boardwalk or scrubbed him in the hard, scalding water of Aunt Imogen's shower, there would be grains of sand on his bedsheets and pillow when he awoke. It probably came from his eyelashes, his mother said dismissively, or from between his toes, and even before the reassuring, grown-up refrains of hypothesis and scientific theory, he'd thought she was right, but he couldn't be sure, you see, because he had washed his toes the night before with scrupulous care, and the sight of those tiny grains where there should have been none filled him with an inexplicable, dry-mouthed unease.

_It was dishonest. That was what bothered you, made the spittle go sour in your mouth. All your life, you'd been taught that honesty was the best policy, to be a straight shooter as your grandfather called it. But sand wasn't honest. It was sneaky and crept into places uninvited. It'd hide in the crack of your ass if you weren't careful. There was something malicious in the seething, shifting latency of it, a malicious sentience that made your skin crawl._

_You went to the beach because you liked the smell of sea salt and brine and the reflection of the sunlight on the water. You liked to let the water lap at your toes and wade out deeper to feel the caress of kelp on your ankles and calves. You liked the suntans and the souvenirs and the stories brought back for the neighborhood boys of pretty girls in flimsy bikinis, but you never liked the sand, and you avoided it whenever you could. Sandcastles could be built just as well with dirt, and in the end, it didn't matter what they were built with because they all succumbed to the gentle, enticing tongue of the sea._

_You never told anyone how you felt about sand, especially not the sergeant at the Army recruiting station you walked into one afternoon after a fight with your father that had gone on three words too long. You knew it wasn't rational, that it was the talk of cracked and fragile minds. Minds like David Lessing, who thought to serve his country by reducing a building to rubble with you inside it. So you kept your mouth shut and your shoulders squared and prayed that Uncle Sam needed one more corn-fed, Midwestern boy for his ranks because it was the only way out of a town that was no longer home._

_Uncle Sam sent you and a herd of other newly-adopted sons to Parris Island, where you spent the next six weeks tasting dirt in your mouth from all the push-ups and peeling skin from pus-filled blisters on your hands and feet. You learned to eat the gruel that the Army called food. Your campmates laughed at it, called it leather and dogshit, and it was true. It was all of those things, but you were secretly glad that it never tasted like sand. When the others bitched and moaned about the dirt, you resisted the urge to tell them that at least it wasn't sand, that at least it would swirl down the shower drain like it was supposed to and not be waiting for them on their cots and in the bristles of their toothbrushes._

_Then your orders came down, and you were shipped to Beirut, a city birthed from the sand that surrounded it. Hell, the entire Middle East was a goddamned empire of sand. The thought inspired a green-gilled revulsion, but there was no question of not going. A Marine followed orders, and besides, you didn't want the other guys thinking you were a spineless chickenshit. So, you packed your duffel and shined your shoes and turned up at the hangar with your collar starched and stiff._

_Beirut was a beautiful city, or at least it had been before the bombs flew and left smoking craters in their wake. But you learned how soulless and nasty sand could be over there, more than you ever wanted to. You had entered its dominion, and its powers were limitless. There was no crevice it could not fill, no niche it could not claim with its formless, golden fingers. It covered everything in a fine, ever-shifting scrim, and after a week, reaching out to brush it from tables and chairs was as much an autonomic response as breathing or blinking. It even found its way into the MREs that were supposedly vacuum-sealed against it._

_Most of your fellow soldiers regarded it as nothing more than a literal pain in the ass. They laughed it off when they tasted grit in their toothpaste or had to wipe its grains from the damp heads of their cocks after a trip to the latrine. Your bunkmate in the barracks was a skinny, Norwegian kid from Bumfuck, Minnesota, and he played in the sand the way kids play in the snow when they see it for the first time. He was constantly picking it up and letting it drizzle through his fingers, and he told you more than once that he was going to send a baggie of it home to his girlfriend._

'S Pretty, you know? _he told you earnestly one night, sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a cigarette dangling loosely between his lips. He fumbled inside a wadded-up sock for his Zippo and flipped it open with a practiced flick of his wrist. _Like gold. _He exhaled smoke with lazy grace, and for some reason, it reminded you of Aunt Imogen, who was already dead. _

_You suppressed a shudder and shook your head. _Fool's gold, _you thought, but your mouth said, _It itches like hell, Whitney, and what's she going to do with a bag of sand, anyway? That's no kinda gift. Why don't you send her some nice perfume or a swatch of pretty fabric, maybe some dried dates? Bet those'd go over better than sand. Be more thoughtful, too.

_He shook his head. _Nah. Too expensive, and besides, I like to take a piece of wherever I've been with me.

Still, _you persisted, _Something better than sand. Sand's a pain in the ass. It'll get everywhere if you let it.

_Whitney laughed and took a drag off his cigarette. _If you let it? Fuck, Taylor, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were spooked.

_He laughed again, and you laughed with him because you didn't want anyone to know that he was right. You were spooked by it, and you had no childhood terror to blame it on. You dropped the subject and played cards over a milkcrate table, betting cigarettes instead of chips. He cleaned you out, but you didn't mind because you only smoked to pass the time and distract your mouth from the dry, Communion wafer taste of sand. You played all night in the hopes that Whitney would forget all about his pouch of sand._

_But the very next afternoon, you saw him squatting in the sand by the mess hall, and you knew what he was doing. He was gathering it for his girlfriend back home. You wanted to tell him to leave the sand alone, to put it back before something terrible happened, but when he looked up at you and grinned, you could only smile weakly back at him because you knew he'd never believe you. He might even report you to the CO and punch your ticket home courtesy of a Section 08 discharge, and back then, the Army was all you had. So, you shouldered your carbine, shuffled past him into the chow tent, and ate eggs that tasted like sand._

_But you were right. Something terrible did happen to Whitney. The sand took him in the end, swallowed up his bleeding, screaming mouth._

_Beirut was where you learned that sand had a voice. It was usually sly and sussurating and sibilant, but it could scream, too, howl with a thousand untold furies. It held thirty centuries of secrets beneath its lashing tongue and behind its teeth, and it wasn't always quiet. It was a shrieking dervish on that morning in 1983, when the barracks exploded with a thunderclap and sent bunks and body parts flying. There was a sandstorm that morning, and the sand decided to sing._

_You could hear it as you blundered your way through the rubble of the barracks with your carbine clutched in gritty, blood-streaked hands. It was the only thing you could hear in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The pressure from the blast had concussed your eardrums, and everything else was muffled and indistinct, words spoken underwater in a dream. But that scream was unmistakable, shrill and triumphant as the sand scoured exposed faces and open wounds. It was the sound of victory._

_You found Whitney twenty yards from his bunk, and even with sand and smoke in your eyes, you knew he was bad. In fact, the pragmatist in you knew he was lost, but the idealist in you who believed in Semper Fi refused to give up. You dropped to you knees in the sand and tried to fix the unfixable. His guts were exposed to the sky, wet and glistening, and every time he breathed, they shifted and quivered. His hands were waving spasmodically over the hole, fluttering ineffectually at the ragged, stringy edges of the wound, and you suspected he was trying to brush the sand away. You couldn't blame him, but it was no use. There was too much, and it was filling him like sawdust._

_You grabbed his hands, and they were cold to the touch. _Don't. Whitney, can you hear me? It's me, Mac.

_His head never moved, but his eyes rolled in their sockets. His mouth worked, but if he was trying to say your name, all that emerged was blood, dark and sticky on his lips and chin. Not that it mattered; you couldn't hear him anyway. Recognition flickered in his eyes, and he tried to say something else, _cold_, maybe._

Don't talk, Whitney. It's going to be okay. You just hang in there for me. Medic! _you screamed. _Medic! _But the other men were just as deaf as you, and the wind was the Devil's chorus, and no one came._

_So you knelt in sand that shifted beneath your knees and belied the stability of the world, and watched it soak up the blood that gushed out of Whitney with every heartbeat. The ground was so parched and desperate for moisture that the blood never puddled. It was simply sucked into the earth in vampiric tribute, and you wondered if it was taken in exchange for the sand he had stolen for his girlfriend back in Minnesota. It was a superstitious idea born of combat hysteria, but it made your flesh crawl in the ninety-degree heat._

_The worst part about watching Whitney die wasn't the pulsing wound, and it wasn't the helpless tears he cried as he stared at a sun blotted out by curtains of sand. It was the relentless, inevitable way the sand buried him. It filled his wound like packing gauze and swept into his open, gasping mouth. It scoured his eyes and nose, and as he choked and sputtered and grew a goatee of sand and blood on his chin, you thought about your Aunt Imogen and all those trips to the beach._

_Maybe it wasn't the cigarettes that killed her, turned her lungs black and leathery and tumorous. Maybe it was the sand, creeping, sneaking sand that found its way past her lips with every drag. Maybe the sand had gotten into her and strangled her from the inside. It was dark and horrible and altogether plausible, and it prompted you to brush the sand from Whitney's face and mouth and tell him over and over again that it was going to be okay even when it wasn't._

_It was twenty minutes before a medic lumbered over to inspect the damage, and by then, Whitney was long gone. His heart had shuddered to a stop, and he was cold and pale and waxy in your grip. The medic peered at him from behind goggles, grunted, and painted his forehead with an F. _Fatality.

There's nothin' more you can do for this one, soldier, _he told you matter-of-factly, and scuttled off in search of survivors, back bent against the buffeting wind._

_You knew you should go after him, help look for other soldiers trapped in the rubble, but you didn't want to leave Whitney behind, not when your motto was, _Leave no man behind, _and not when you knew what would happen if you did. It would bury him completely, leave no trace for the medic to find when he came back with a bodybag and a litter. Whitney would be lost to the sand and sleep forever with his mouth full of shifting grains of gold._

_So you stayed with your lost cause and brushed the sand from his face and open eyes, dusted it from his pants and boots. It was unending, and you only had ten fingers, fingers scrubbed raw by the storm. Scoop, scoop, scoop, and still the sand blanketed his legs and drifted over his stomach, its uniformity marred only by the splotch of red over his gut that was rapidly drying to maroon. You were still sweeping when a pair of soldiers shambled up with a litter between them, gas masks over their faces to protect against the storm's clawing fury._

_They put him on the litter and spirited him away, and the last image you ever saw of Pfc. Stan Whitney was hours later, long after the storm had broken. You saw his socked feet hanging off the edge of a cot while an exhausted medic dumped the sand from his boots and slipped his dog tags inside to ship them home. You stared at his feet until the medic closed the tent flap, and then you stumbled into the showers and watched grains of sand and flecks of Whitney mingle in perverse fraternity as they swirled down the drain._

_You've never trusted sand since, and you absolutely refuse to walk on it in bare feet. You wore loafers to the beach on your honeymoon in Acapulco. Claire thought it was funny as she pranced and pirouetted in the sand and luxuriated in the feel of damp sand between her toes, and you laughed with her because laughter shared was not madness. You laughed with her so you wouldn't scream when you woke to the rasp and scratch of sand on the hotel sheets. Claire was smart and lovely and priceless, and she didn't deserve to be tainted by your private darkness before the weight of her wedding band had settled onto her finger._

_Claire was also a paradox because she was a child of the sand, raised in the California sunshine and transplanted to the cold, concrete gardens of Chicago by the demands of adulthood. She was golden as the sun, even in the bleak, bone-whiteness of winter, and you could hear echoes of the sand in her laughter. Not the harsh, grating caw of desert sand baked hard by millennia of unblinking sun, but the warm, cool wetness of surf-kissed, California sand. She tasted like salt when you kissed her, the tangy rime of a margarita glass, and when you touched her, she poured through your fingers in a seductive, slithering dance._

_Claire was a windstorm, but she did not cut. She enfolded you, protected you, filled your empty spaces and moved with you through the world. She was the Sphinx and the serpent, and she was all that good and safe. You let your guard down with her, and that was a mistake, one that Stan Whitney could have warned you about if he weren't almost seventeen years dead by then. You thought she was safe, and she gave you the deepest cut of all._

_They told you it was ash that rained down on you that morning as you wandered around the city under the pretense of official police business, and you were too shocked to dispute them as you picked your way over mounds of rubble that belonged seventeen years behind you. It was Beirut all over again, only bigger and louder, and as you watched dazed survivors lurch from the blast zone with soot and blood on their blank, slack faces, you kept expecting to see Whitney lying on the ground with his guts unzipped and quivering._

_But there was no Whitney, not that day. There was just Claire, raining down on you in a fine mist that coated your upturned face and hands. She covered you in small, golden grains, crept into your socks and beneath your nails and into your open mouth. You swallowed her whole and breathed her in, and you kept looking for her because you couldn't believe that's all that was left, that was all she would leave behind. You looked until your eyes throbbed and burned with the effort of blinking her away. Parts of her were in a thousand uncomprehending faces, but never the whole, never the part of her that made her quintessentially Claire. That had spiraled forever beyond your reach on the plumes of smoke that rose from the crater that used to be her office building._

_You went on looking until a voice in a blue uniform ordered you to go home, and then Stella drove you home, thin-lipped and silent in her chariot of bone. For a moment, you thought you'd found Claire in the tears on her dusty, hollowed cheeks, but it was just Stella, fierce, independent, bowed but unbroken Stella. You were the broken one that day, and you left pieces of yourself on the passenger seat of her car like sloughed skin. She offered to come inside with you, sweeping up the shed pieces as she came, but you couldn't. You shook your head and shut her out, and then you locked the door and sat on the couch with the TV turned off and ash and Claire all over you._

_Eventually-you don't know exactly when because until this morning, the details of that day had been excised from your life with surgical precision-you wandered to the hall closet on wooden, matchstick legs and brought down Claire's beachball, the one she'd bought in Acapulco, the one she'd joked about being your first joint purchase. You carried it back to the couch and sat with it on your lap, the child you'd never discussed and would never have,_

_It was vinyl and red and white and orange and green, and it was filled with her breath. You rested your cheek against its smooth surface and told yourself that it still smelled like her perfume and the coconut oil sunblock she smeared on her skin to prevent sunburns. You pretended not to hear the sly, chuckling slither of desert sand as it slid from one side to the other._

_What you told Ivanov's last victim was true enough; you kept that ball because it was all that remained of Claire, but you've never told anybody the whole truth, not even a woman who's only breathing because her brain doesn't realize she's dead. You can't. It's too monstrous, a child's fairy tale run amok. It's a truth a man of science would never abide, and yet, you cannot let it go._

_You still have that beach ball because you're afraid to open the valve. Claire's ghost might rush past your face, warm and stale and smelling of vinyl and mothballs and old despair. The last of her would slip from your life on a puff of air, and you wouldn't even see her go. Or maybe there would be nothing in it but sand, soft, California sand that would explode from the ball like a genie unleashed, never to be captured again. It would infest every inch of your life, every clean, safe place you had carved for yourself in the wake of Beirut and the crumbling of the Towers._

_But that dreadful possibility hadn't occurred to you then, and it was a comfort to have something of hers so close to your dirty, gritty face. You stroked the smooth, glassy surface of the ball and told yourself that any minute now, the door would open, and she would lurch inside with dirt on her face and blood in her hair and one broken, high-heeled shoe in her hand. But she never did. The door remained resolutely closed, and the ash and Claire stayed in your hair._

_You didn't want to wash her off. You wanted to keep her with you as long as you could, but when you tried to sleep in your clothes, the California sand became desert sand against your raw, unprotected skin, and you wound up dancing a jig in the darkness beside the bed as you tore off your clothes and scrubbed blindly at the darning needles underneath your skin. You barked your shin against the bathroom door and almost took a header into the shower, and then you stood there in the dark and shivered like a drunk, arms wrapped around yourself for comfort._

_When your trembling hands finally found the tap, you turned it on full bore and adjusted it until the water scalded your back and shoulders, and then you stood beneath the stream with your eyes screwed shut so you wouldn't have to see Claire washing down the drain with an undignified gurgle. But you saw it anyway. The Marine in you wouldn't let you shirk your duty, and it made you look, made you acknowledge what you were doing. _

_You didn't want to let her go, even if she was in pieces, so you tried to scoop her up, gather her in your hands, but she slipped through your wet, grasping fingers. You could only sit slumped on the shower and let the water drip into eyes that had forgotten how to blink. That was the first and only time you fell apart, and then you pulled the plug and built the walls to keep the sand out._

Except the sand had found another way in, through his friends and colleagues. One by one, it had worn them away. They were all jagged now, whittled to the bone, and in Aiden's case, it hadn't even left that. Just white teeth against blackened bone and a pile of ash for the casket that had been so discreetly closed at her service. He wondered now and again if her father visited the grave with flowers, stoop-shouldered and grey and fading quietly into death without a whimper. Maybe he carried the sand home on his shoes and in the cuffs of his pants, where it cut grooves into his face and thinned him to tired eyes and old bones.

Danny had certainly carried it home, though he wasn't sure where and when it had found him. Maybe it had been Aiden's parting gift to an old friend, or maybe it had been castoff from the bat used to fracture Louie Messer's skull in two places. Danny had always been harder than the others, tempered by hard knocks and the looming shadow of police surveillance, but now there was no softness at all, no light on his face or in his eyes. He was hard, brutal angles inside ragged, ill-fitting clothes that needed washing, and his eyes were wary and shuttered.

And then there was Stella. If he wanted, he could turn her head and see her beside Flack, holding his limp hand in her warm, scarred one. He knew how the sand had gotten into her: It had embedded itself underneath the skin of her nails when she'd sliced her fingertips to ribbons in her bathtub. It was inside her now, and it had hardened her from the inside out, made her bitter and irritable, a queen of ice and glass.

Now it had come for Flack. There had been no subtlety this time, no finesse. It had simply ripped him open and settled into the open, pulsating wound. Just like Whitney.

You thought it was Whitney at first. The explosion bent time, turned it backward into the past in a terrible, warbling loop, and when you stepped over the smoking rubble and saw him lying there, he was wearing Whitney's face. Suddenly, it was 1983 again, and you were dumb and green and scared shitless in some shithole called Beirut. You dropped to your knees and watched his eyes roll to white, turning inward to the next life while he unmoored from this one with every beat of his heart.

_You told him he would be all right, and your mouth burned with the lie because it was the same thing you told Whitney before simple biology made you a liar. You made a promise history showed you couldn't keep, and you bet it all on bottled water and a borrowed shoelace. You told the lie over and over again in the hope that repetition would make it real, Peter Pan wishing life into a dying fairy whose light was guttering, smothered beneath a curtain of dust._

_You know what the worst part is, Mac, the part that twists in your gut like fresh shrapnel? You weren't trying to save Flack in the building. The truth is, you never saw him. You saw Stan Whitney, and you were trying to unthread the past. That's why you stuffed a piece of Flack's torn coat into the wound. To keep the sand out._

He looked into Flack's room, and the angle of light distorted the image. Flack's face doubled and trebled, and then it was Whitney's, pale and dead and covered in sand. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and the illusion was gone, but only for a moment. Another blink, and Whitney was there again.

He gritted his teeth and scrubbed his face with his hands. The skin was raw and chapped, and he winced. _Flack, _he thought fiercely. _Flack, Flack, Flack. That's Flack in there, not Whitney. Whitney is dead and has been since 1983, and nothing will ever change that._

He stood with a creak of tendon and popping vertebrae and went into Flack's room. His shoes were loud on the scuffed linoleum. _Flack, _they reprimanded him sharply. _Flack._

Stella started at his approach. "Mac," she greeted him wearily. Her voice was hoarse and grating. She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.

_Her voice is full of sand, _he thought nonsensically. "Take a break, Stella. I'll watch him for a while."

_Watch who? _countered a cynical voice inside his head.

_Flack, _he told himself. _I'll watch Flack._

Stella shook her head. "No, Mac, I'm good," she insisted stubbornly, and promptly yawned again.

He rested his hand on her shoulder and flinched at the hard spar of bone beneath his palm. _Too thin. Too thin. She's scored and whittled just like Aiden's father and Danny._ "Stella," he began more firmly.

She cut him off with a ruthless slice of her palm. "Dammit, Mac, I said no," she snapped, and cast a guilty, sidelong glance at Flack, who did not stir. "I'm not leaving him," she finished quietly.

"Nobody said anything about leaving," he answered reasonably. "I just thought you might like a chance to freshen up and grab some more coffee."

Her pinched face softened at the mention of coffee, and she offered him a bleary smile. "I _could _go for that," she conceded, and ran her fingers through her hair. She got up with a grimace. "I'll be back in a few. You'll call me if-,"

"You have my word."

"You're a good one, Mac," she said softly, and reached out to rub his shoulder.

_Good ones don't obscure the faces of the living with the faces of the dead, don't draw on fresh wounds to heal old ones that have already scabbed over and toughened to leathery, knurled scar tissue._

_Flack, _chided Stella's shoes as she walked away. _Flack, Flack, Flack._

The closing of the door blocked it out, but only momentarily. Then it was taken up by the rhythmic beep of the cardiac monitor. _Flack, Flack, Flack _into infinity.

He sat in the chair, and it was still warm with lingering body heat. _Like radiant heat off the desert hardpan, _he thought, and the sand in his shoes washed over his toes in gleeful, silky-fingered agreement.

He sat with his elbows propped on his thighs and studied Flack. His face was cool and pale, wax fashioned into human form.

_It wasn't like that this morning, _said the voice of self-recrimination inside his head. _It was bright and animated and full of cocksure vitality. Sure, he bitched about being called in on a Sunday morning, but he ate his bear claw with gusto in the car on the way to the scene, and he turned his face to the sun through the passenger window. Now that you think about it, there's probably some frosting smeared on your center console. Flack's enthusiasm gets a little messy when it comes to food. Hey, maybe you can bag it and take it back to the lab with the rest of the evidence._

_He's too young to be lying here with a tube up his nose. He should be out eyeing pretty girls and reveling in his youth, not teetering scant inches from the end and reliving your nightmares. Because that's exactly what he's doing. He went down because the sand needed another way in, a path under the walls of stoicism you've built around yourself. So it put on Stan Whitney's face, and Flack's still wearing it. It may never come off._

He blinked, and Stan Whitney was in the bed again.

_Flack, _he told himself. _It's Flack._

_Flack! Flack! Flack!_ the cardiac monitor agreed with manic enthusiasm, but the face of the man in the bed did not change.

He stood up in the hopes that a change of perspective would dispel the illusion, exorcise the ghost that lived beneath Don Flack's skin. But Whitney refused to leave. Mac gripped Flack's hand in his own.

"Flack," he said, and wondered why the name suddenly felt so foreign inside his mouth. "Flack, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand." The sand inside his shoes shifted in greedy anticipation.

Mac Taylor closed his eyes and waited.


End file.
